Apocalypse Later Film Reviews

Director: Richard Boylan
Stars: Keltie Squires, Damian Dunwoody, Daphnee Hanrahan and Anthony Rotondi

While we frequently can and do complain about the dearth of cool genre film events in Arizona, a couple of established festivals notably excluded, sometimes we get slapped with a few of them all at once. I was elated to see a feature called Heavy Metal Horror announced at the Valley Art in Tempe, especially with a few of the cast members there in person for a Q&A. I'm a metalhead, a horror nut and a film critic, so this is about as tailor made for me as any movie could be. Unfortunately I was hosting my own film event the same night at LepreCon, so couldn't make it. However executive producer Mel Hoy kindly sent a screener my way so I can catch up, however far after the event. Bizarrely, the film is at once exactly what the title suggests and nowhere near what I'd expected from it. Most obviously, metal is usually fast and this is far from that, even though Armifera, the band who feature here as a fictional version of themselves are very much an old school thrash band. It's a slow, grounded movie that has no concerns about taking its time.

Initially it appears to be two completely different films. The first half of the title naturally follows Armifera, whose original guitar player, Richard Boylan, wrote and directed. Originally named Death Metal Horror, it also inspired their song DMH. Armifera are a real band from Edmonton, Alberta, which is surely why they sound so tight on stage in a tiny club. They're not a groundbreaking act, but they're clearly very capable musicians. I'd happily go to see them live, especially in a club that small. Off stage, they don't appear to be particularly bright, though I don't know if they're putting it on for the sake of the story. Their side thus far is the sort of thing you'd expect: they get together, buy drugs and rehearse. It's no hard task to watch them noodling around and chatting, because it feels very real and thus very believable. We do wonder if it's going to take us anywhere, but it does ground the film effectively while we take in what we're seeing from the second half of the title, which eventually becomes 'horror' but starts out as 'whore'.

In this thread, Boylan adds the hat of documentarian and interviews a hooker about a story she's wanted to get off her chest for a couple of years. Her name isn't Julia but she chooses it for the interview because she liked the movie Romeo and Julia with Claire Danes. Yeah, there are clearly some damaged brain cells in play here, though the actresses (Keltie Squires in older scenes, Daphnee Hanrahan in newer ones) feel as appropriate for the part as Armifera are playing themselves. Julia is lucid but disillusioned, clearly not all there but never too far away. She's a faded beauty, but with solid potential to look good again with an effort. She's a little stupid and a little slow but she's still able to call others on stupid questions. She's not too comfortable about being in the profession she is, apparently, possibly because she was trying to quit two years ago and didn't manage it. 'I'm a hooker' she says with her eyes notably elsewhere. 'I do what I gotta do.' Yet she talks in euphemisms, referring to her sex work as 'arranged meetings' and the like.

The biggest flaw of the movie is in how long it feels like it takes to get moving while we're watching. With hindsight, the pace isn't a problem, but we have to get to the end to realise that, rendering it an odd but eventually satisfying picture. We know the two halves of the story have to connect at some point, partly because there wouldn't be much point otherwise, partly because Julia's interview footage interrupts the renactment of what she's building up to and partly because she's all white and dressed in black but with very red lips, like she's all ready for a role in a stylistic movie with a deliberately restricted colour palette. For a while, the biggest suspense is wondering if the inevitable is really inevitable or whether the halves will remain unconnected. She offers background that's interesting but doesn't seem to take us anywhere; they just do what bands do without ever suggesting why we're watching them do it. It doesn't even seem like we're watching a horror movie, until Chris the guitarist lets us know he's planning to raise a demon.

Now, I've seen movies where bands raise demons and they're not remotely like this. I remember watching The Gate on its original release then walking down to my local record store to order the Sacrifyx album. It was great being a kid watching The Gate, Trick or Treat and their ilk, but this isn't remotely like that. We're not enjoying another cheesy horror flick, we're watching an adult drama, phrased as a fake documentary and with a real band playing themselves to make it seem all the more believable. After so many routine scenes, which frankly include the vocalist putting up freaky fliers with a Satanic vibe, we're conditioned to take the whole demon raising concept as completely normal. Similarly, we hear enough about Julia to quit asking questions when odd things come up. She lived in a haunted house when she was a kid, or at least she thought so. It seems to us like she still does. When she was a kid, her imaginary friend was a hole in the back yard which told her to throw things into it. Like rocks. And cats.

And finally, things start to connect. Vincent, her pimp, texts her to meet a john and she won't do it. She's going to quit the streets. He rings her driver. She runs. And hey, all of a sudden, there's the bar at which Armifera are playing. The stars are finally aligning and we have ourselves a movie, both subplots still in play but unfolding together until the conclusion. As a drama, it's surprisingly engaging for such an odd framework, but as a horror flick we wonder what we actually saw because the finalé is far from explained, probably because the whole tone of the piece is documentarian in nature and open to our interpretation. I had a whole bunch of questions. Is Julia speaking out of guilt or horror? Was something summoned or was something brought? If the latter, who brought it? The film's synopsis suggests that Julia is 'hounded by an evil spirit' but is that before or after? What's with the hole? Does that have a deeper purpose? Is Julia crazy, schizophrenic or demonic? Maybe a second viewing might tell me but the first didn't.

I enjoyed Heavy Metal Horror, though it's far from what I expected it to be. It's not a horror movie; there's nothing camp here, even the parts that would be under different circumstances like the cheesy demonic book. It's more of a drama that reaches into horror territory towards the end, a slow paced one that's all the slower because of the approach taken to mix documentary footage with a reenactment and because it spends far more time than is usual grounding the story in reality. Musicians will surely subconsciously nod their heads while watching this movie because the little details are so true, like the band taking time after their performance to deconstruct their show and all their little mistakes. I wonder if any ladies of the evening watching might do the same, Julia so often talking but not talking or detailing the things she'll do and the things she won't. In the end, it's a sort of art film, something you might expect to watch on IFC or the Sundance Channel rather than on FearNet.

As you might imagine, none of these actors are particularly experienced, but they're all very believable. There's good reason for the band to feel real, of course, given that they are a band; Armifera are a going concern playing gigs in northwestern Canada and festivals like the Calgary Metal Fest and Farmageddon, in the countryside east of Edmonton. Their debut album, Eradication, is also now available and based on what they sound like in this film, it ought to be a good buy. Making an intriguing feature film is surely an original way to build publicity and I wish them well. I have friends in Edmonton, one of whom often stays with us in January, so I'll make it up there one of these years, probably for one of the genre film festivals that sells out up there like DedFest or Deadmonton. Seeing Armifera live on the same trip would be cool. The individual members are characters but not so much that they would thrive outside the band. They're charismatic enough to appear as themselves, but clearly it's music that drives them, not acting.

Of course, the film's approach really doesn't call for acting, mostly calling instead for its cast members to act as naturally as possible. While Anthony Rotondi does get to shout a lot, the only one who really gets the opportunity to act here is Daphnee Hanrahan as the modern day Julia. IMDb only details one previous picture for her, Bridges Over Montreal, a Canadian romcom in which she presumably goes on one of the five memorable first dates that it covers, which all take place, as you might expect, on Montreal bridges. That would seem like a notably different role to this one and I'd be interested to see how she does. This is hardly the sort of movie that allows us to really gauge her talent. She's believable in the role of a hooker wanting to not be a hooker and she gets enough little quirks of character in there to become memorable. In many ways the film itself does the same thing. It doesn't seem to do much, but it does it uniquely and it's all the more memorable for that. It's definitely not your usual horror flick but it's still worth a look.

Director: Charles Chaplin
Stars: Charlie Chaplin, Roscoe Arbuckle, Phyllis Allen and Minta Durfee

I'm reviewing each of the 36 films Charlie Chaplin made for Keystone Studios in 1914 on the centennial of their original releases. Here's an index to these reviews.

Charles Parrott's pre-Charley Chase appearance in His New Profession reminded me yet again how early Charlie Chaplin's work was when compared to the other great silent comedians. The Rounders highlights what else could have been: a great comedy double act, not only because the characters of Mr Full and Mr Fuller display some notable chemistry between Chaplin and Roscoe Arbuckle that could easily have been built upon in future films, but because there's little else here except that double act, the story threadbare but the laughter acute. Arbuckle was established before Chaplin, of course, starting out five years earlier at the Selig Polyscope Company and later switching to Keystone in 1913, where he established Fatty, his regular character. His double act with Mabel Normand, which ran from late 1914 into 1916, maybe began with his title role in Mabel's New Hero in 1913. Had Chaplin not left Keystone, it all could have been very different, as this film ably highlights. Instead Arbuckle teamed up with Buster Keaton in 1917.

There were many double acts in the slapstick age but none come quicker to mind today than Laurel and Hardy, one that outlasted the silent era by decades, their final film together arriving as late as the 1951 feature, Atoll K. It's perhaps worth highlighting that they were young men in their early twenties in 1914, Stan Jefferson still with Fred Karno's vaudeville troupe, the very one which Chaplin had left for Keystone, and Babe Hardy starting out on screen in split reelers for the Lubin Company in Florida. Their double act wouldn't officially debut for thirteen years in 1927's Putting Pants on Philip, though they did appear in a couple of earlier films together. The first of them, The Lucky Dog, wouldn't arrive until 1921 and Laurel's debut on screen wasn't until 1917's Nuts in May. As Arbuckle and Chaplin pioneered the little and large double act in The Rounders, the latter's former understudy, Stanley Jefferson, seven years before taking his stage name of Stan Laurel, was doing impersonations of him on stage for Fred Karno.

Chaplin, of course, was too independent to be locked down to a mere partnership. He was the epitome of a solo artiste, even if he proved as early as his fifth film, Between Showers, that he could work well with a partner, albeit the actor he was replacing at Keystone, Ford Sterling. Within a couple of weeks these two would do more work together worthy of a double act in Tango Tangles, most obviously the superb scene towards the end where they try to put on the same coat at the same time. Arbuckle and Chaplin were big names at this point for Keystone and they had already shared the screen in six previous pictures, though none are real partnerships. The most time they shared together before this was either in Tango Tangles, in which they literally battle on the dancefloor for a pretty hat check girl, or The Knockout, a film starring Arbuckle as a man who ends up in a boxing match officiated over by Chaplin in one of his guest slots in other Keystone stars' pictures. However, after this success, they'd never share the screen again.

Beyond the obvious potential for an ongoing double act that never happened, what leaps out here is the pacing. Chaplin's script may have had very little to say but it had a lot to say about how it should unfold. We're introduced to each of the four major characters individually, so that they have the opportunity to develop before they start colliding with the others, collisions which grow naturally too. Chaplin is Mr Full, yet another opportunity for him to haul out his drunk routine, as he's three sheets to the wind as he first staggers onto screen; the odd word in the title comes from an old slang term for drunkards, presumably those who make the rounds of bars. Jeffrey Vance describes this as 'the best of Chaplin's drunk roles for Keystone' and I'm not going to argue with that, especially as he's notably better at it than Arbuckle, who would have sold his drunk routine more effectively if he wasn't tasked with trying to match an actor who was hired by Mack Sennett on the basis of his stage role as a drunk in Karno's Mumming Birds.

Chaplin's introduction is very reminiscent of Mabel's Strange Predicament, his third film, in which he stole all the early scenes by stumbling around a hotel and getting in the way of everyone else in the film. Here he's stumbling around a new hotel but its geography is exactly the same. In both films, he stumbles into the lobby, where he interacts with a lady in a chair to his right and another in one on his left. Eventually he makes his way up the stairs at the back which lead to a hallway with a pair of rooms on each side. We find our leads in the two rooms nearest to the camera. Here, Mr and Mrs Full have the room to our right, while Mr Fuller and his wife occupy the one opposite. These characters are bounced between them, often quite literally, as the story progresses. In the earlier film, Mabel and her significant other had the room to our right, while the couple they get caught up with are on the other side of the hallway. Some things are apparently clearly defined in the cinematic comedy rulebook; even the carpet is identical.

As Mr Full, Chaplin is apparently doing much better for himself than he has for a number of shorts, even if he forgot to change his shoes along with the rest of his costume. We have no idea why he's so drunk, but we get one when we meet his wife, who's a formidable battleaxe in the form of Phyllis Allen, overbearing and violent. No wonder he has eyes for the fluff in the lobby! It's telling that she uses his cane to pull him towards her in a similar way to how Charlie pulled his employer's girlfriend to him only a week earlier in His New Profession, albeit with completely different intent. Charlie was getting fresh in that film; Mrs Full is merely trying to keep him upright so she can upbraid him some more. Once we have their relationship down, Mr Fuller and his wife can make their entrances, introduced in a similar way that highlights both similarities and differences. Fuller enters like Full, only instead of ogling the girl he sits on her. His wife is initially as weepy as Mrs Full is violent, but only initially. When she gets going, she really gets going.

If this setup is completely reminiscent of Mabel's Strange Predicament, fortunately the ensuing chaos is not. The earlier film had a more substantial plot, but it was a stupid one, better suited to the pantomime stage with its hide and seek shenanigans. This doesn't go far beyond two drunks dealing with their upset wives, in a way that brings them together, when they realise that they're masonic buddies or some such and escape their collective wrath of their wives arm in arm for a nearby café. The gags are improved too, Chaplin's in particular. One has him unable to get up from the floor as he's standing on his coat; another sees him thrown bodily onto the bed, where he finds himself upside down because his feet have caught on the headboard. Arbuckle does well in the scene with his wife too, though perhaps partly because she really was his wife. Minta Durfee and Roscoe Arbuckle made a strange couple, but they wed in 1908 and remained married until 1925, though they were estranged before his legal turmoil in 1921.

The best and worst moments of the film unfold at Smith's Café. The latter is clearly the decision to have Billy Gilbert play the doorman in blackface, something that admittedly wasn't offensive at the time but is still completely unnecessary to the picture as a whole, which makes it all the more offensive in hindsight. The former arrives when we find ourselves trying to figure out which of the two leads we're supposed to be watching. After Mr Fuller attempts to lift an almost paralytic Mr Full off the floor using not one but two canes, their action splits in two. Arbuckle is trying to disentangle his jacket from his hat, drinking tabasco sauce or something similar and using the the champagne bucket as a footstool. Meanwhile, Chaplin is at the next table causing problems for Jess Dandy's unnamed diner. Only when both of them end up using their respective tablecloths as blankets and collapsing onto the floor into drunken sleep does the action bring them back together again, quite literally and with a thump.

This would have been a good ending, especially as the slower, more methodical pace makes it seem like we've already reached the end of a reel, but there's the traditional Keystone chase to come, another one that takes us into Echo Park where characters end up as always in the Echo Park Lake, but with a notable change: this time we see a growing crowd of onlookers on the other side of the lake as the action moves on. They're too far away for us to see details, but California locals had been apparent in a number of the films Chaplin made at Keystone which were shot in public spaces and how those everyday folk interacted with them changed over time. Initially they were disinterested, even annoyed, by the distraction Chaplin was at the beginning of Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal, but they moved to enjoyment by the end, then on to casual acceptance in Tango Tangles, grinning awareness in Mabel's Busy Day and now on to standard tourist activity here in The Rounders. Such was Chaplin's rise through 1914.

As always, there are problems with the film, which is another strong step forward in terms of pacing and structure, as well as the manipulation of more emotions than were usually found in comedies of this era. Rounders are dissolute drunks, debauchers, but Mr Full and Mr Fuller aren't as obnoxious as many of the drunks Chaplin had played at Keystone. These rounders certainly become sympathetic by the point they swap their secret handshakes and we're with them all the way to the end, but we didn't need Arbuckle's attempt to strangle his wife to stop her beating him up. Phyllis Allen is overly violent to her husband as well, throwing Chaplin across the room with a vengeance. At least her performance is far more consistent than that of Minta Durfee, who pantomimes a great deal too much, the old school overdone silent acting she throws out in her solo scenes reminding at once of how much of that we got early in Chaplin's 1914 films and how much it gradually decreased. Allen and Durfee rage well at each other though.

Chaplin is the star here, of course, as writer, director and lead actor, but he plays very well with Arbuckle, who brought a new level to his co-star's regular routine as a drunk, one of my favourite moments in this film being when Mr Full trips on the welcome mat outside the hotel and Mr Fuller keeps on going, literally dragging his colleague along behind him because they're arm in arm. Arbuckle was a big man, hence the nickname he never appreciated that became the name of his regular character, but he was often able to use that attribute to his advantage. He's not loose enough to be as believably drunk as Chaplin and he's too obviously aware of his surroundings when he's bouncing people off his belly. Yet the pair of them are great on screen together. Arbuckle later praised Chaplin, saying that, 'I have always regretted not having been his partner in a longer film than these one-reelers we made so rapidly.' He's not alone. Lack of story aside, I got a real kick out of this one and wish they'd have been a double act for longer.

Important Sources:
Jeffrey Vance - Chaplin: Genius of the Cinema (2003)

The Rounders can be watched for free at YouTube or downloaded in a number of formats from the Internet Archive.

To see the restored versions of Chaplin's Keystone films in all their glory, it's highly recommended that you pick up the Flicker Alley box set, Chaplin at Keystone. It omits only Her Friend the Bandit, which is considered a lost film, and half of A Thief Catcher, which was previously thought lost but now recovered. The full version debuted in The Mack Sennett Collection Vol 1.

Director: Nitara Lee Osbourne
Stars: Kathleen Benner, Rachel Owens, Jose Rosete, Sevan McBride and Wil Rillero

To switch things up a bit from the predominantly action and horror movies I've been covering thus far for my Arizona feature project, here's a lesbian drama from writer/director Nitara Lee Osbourne. Well, that's what most people seem to take it for, even though there's a lot more going on, and they either love it or hate it accordingly. Some hate the film because there's only one brief sex scene even though IMDb lists keywords for it like 'female nudity' and 'lesbian love', while some love it because there's only one brief sex scene but the two leading ladies, Kathleen Benner and Rachel Owens, are believably close anyway. The contrast between sex and love is only one of the themes that Osbourne riffs on throughout; there's much that's worthy of discussion here and she deserves a good deal of credit for attempting so much in one feature. Sadly, her drive to send a very particular message (this was based on true events) prompts much of the negative side as she refuses to let her characters collaborate with her.

While this is generally seen as a lesbian film, that isn't the first theme that's explored; initially, this aims to take a look at fresh starts. Sydney Harris moves to Phoenix in the summer of 2000 with her husband, Corey, a former marine now working as a private investigator, and their young son, Matt, who's too old to be starting kindergarten partway through the movie. Their new home isn't the only fresh start. They are clearly not connecting well as a couple and Sydney is fighting thyroid cancer, something that they can't afford and thus is putting even more strain on their relationship. The second theme looks at what makes a hero. Corey saved the life of a colleague under fire, someone who was overtly thankful even though he lost a leg in the process. Having been a hero once, he feels frustrated that he can't be one again, to save his own wife, because he simply doesn't earn enough. He does everything he can for her, but he does it out of a sense of duty rather than because she wants him to. He thinks it's what heroes do.

The third theme is the most awkward one because of where it leads; it's the difference between religion and spirituality, as personified in the leading ladies. Sydney takes Matt to the playground in the park and he gets squirted by another kid with a water gun. He's Tony Smith and Sydney immediately hits it off with his mum, Jane. Jane epitomises spirituality as she's a free spirit, much more bubbly than Sydney and with a powerful smile that's even more notable during the few scenes when it's absent. Sydney, however, has a Roman Catholic background, so everything in her life is wrapped up in guilt, something that particularly plagues her when she realises that she's fallen in love with Jane. Even now, the film isn't about lesbians, as Jane, her kids and her house, are merely ways that Sydney can escape what's behind her. Presumably she ties her cancer and her husband together in her mind, even though he's decent, loyal and caring, so she tries to run away from both. She runs away a lot, often literally to underline the point.

By this point we're starting to see the strong aspects and the weak ones. The actors are strong, all three of the major cast selling their characters and aiming to endow them with substantial depth. The themes are flowering and the picture has a lot of potential. There's also a really nice transition into flashback, as Corey slams his fist down on the table at home and we explode into a battle scene where he's being a hero. It's the technical side that also leans most into the negative though. The sound is the worst, with certain indoor scenes underpinned by background noise that sounds like someone's vacuuming in the next room or a jet engine is about to take off next door. Bizarrely, sound isn't a consistent problem, as it's mostly OK, just obviously poor in some scenes. The camerawork is generally capable, if never particularly ambitious, but the colours are too warm throughout. The music is consistently predictable too, especially in the more overtly religious scenes; it's also often overblown and intrusive.

It's as the film progresses that it starts to show its seams. The big themes are good ones but when any of the characters question, the script refuses to bend to give them the opportunity to grow. This often leads to odd scenes where they act out of character because that's where the themes require them to go. Some of this even leads to contradictions that shouldn't be there, because you can't force a square peg through a round hole. Little details are less problematic but more predictable. We can usually see where the script is going to go by keeping an eye on them because they're always telegraphing something. As characters say things, we can see the scene after next because that's obviously the only reason why they had those lines to begin with. These issues made me wonder about something else that could be seen as a positive or a negative; the way in which lines of dialogue obviously apply to more characters than those to whom they're delivered. I saw these as positive for about half the film but then started to switch to negative.

Another major flaw is the character of Geri Woods, not because Amber Ryan does a bad job because she does precisely what's required of her, but because a conscience should never have been this prominent. Corey's conscience is personified by John Duncan, the soldier whose life he saved, though one late scene hints that perhaps he didn't save him after all. If he's imaginary at this point, why should we assume he wasn't earlier? Similarly, if he's imaginary to Corey, perhaps Geri, Sydney's conscience, is imaginary too. She seems real though, an intrusive, obnoxious character who raises a lot of awkward questions. She's a lesbian who turned celibate for Jesus and adopts a mission to convince Sydney to do the same. Sydney's Roman Catholic and the priest to whom she gives her confession is worse than useless, so she's happy to both follow her heart and then feel notably guilty about it. Geri should have been a one scene character to make an important point, but she moves into the film like an unwelcome guest and refuses to leave.

I liked the setup of the first half hour and appreciated the promise that was offered by a thoughtful script. I was less impressed by the second, which creaked its way into the lesbian drama that Osbourne perhaps always wanted it to be. The third half hour was like the second but more so, because the characters were consistently screaming to develop while she held them back to tell the story she wanted. I was impressed most by the actors at this point, because they kept my interest even as they became progressively more forced. As Sydney, Kathleen Benner is an engaging lead, the pivot of the drama, but she's unable to find ways to sell many of the changes that she's going through as they don't all make sense. Jane should be a lot more than just Sydney's love interest and Rachel Owens seems up for it, but the script holds her back in that one role and can't stay consistent. Jose Rosete is especially hamstrung because he's given depth but no story arc, struggling at the end with the same things he was struggling with at the beginning.

And that's a real shame. While I appreciated the way in which none of the major characters come out of this as either the good guy or the bad guy, I didn't appreciate how they didn't come out as themselves, pun accidental but appropriate. I also didn't like how the film never seemed to end, or rather that it kept ending, with the last half hour full of places where the credits could have run, only for yet another scene to carry on regardless. This is a ninety minute story that takes two hours to unfold and shredding Geri's role down to match John Duncan's is only the beginning of what the editor should have excised from the picture. I was surprised to see that Webb Pickersgill edited, as this felt very much like what happens when a writer edits their own work. His cinematography is generally a lot better here than his editing, if he was left to his own devices. I have a feeling that he may not have been and, at the end of the day, he was stuck with the material that was shot and that focused on the script which refused to bend.

Osbourne's refusal to let her characters tell their stories as they saw fit shapes the whole picture and that sadly overwhelms many of the more ambitious things she attempted. Even as annoyed as I became with the inconsistencies, obstinance and out of character moments, I liked how she continued to weave those bigger themes through her script, most of them still worthy of praise at the end. The love vs sex angle is particularly well handled, one reason why the growing relationship between Sydney and Jane is so strong. Jane, with her two kids and many prior relationships, explains to Sydney that she's never made love, only had sex, something that helps their friendship grow into something more. The hero angle is deepened by a discovery late in the film that isn't surprising but is welcome anyway. Unfortunately it's weakened later still by scenes that shouldn't be there, especially a few of Corey's. The theme of religious guilt is the one that's resolved best (the conflict is abandoned) but it was bludgeoned into submission first.

It might be ironic that Sydney is a screenwriter with a BA from Yale and a subplot that has her submitting her work to studios to fulfil a dream or it might merely be projection on Osbourne's part. While the film is apparently based on a true story, I have no idea whether it's hers or not. It could be that she's telling her own story through abstraction into a character or she could just be adding little details to Sydney to build her character. Certainly she has a sense of humour, as at one point Sydney and Jane watch a short on TV called Romey and Jules. Sydney says she can write better than that and Jane agrees, but Osbourne was a script supervisor on that short earlier in her career. Given what she achieves with this script, I'm sure that she can write better than this too, but she needed fresh eyes on it and she needed another draught; this isn't what it should have ended up as. Most of all, she needed to collaborate with her characters, loosing them from the rigid framework she constructed and letting them go where they needed to.

Director: Travis Mills
Stars: Eric Almassy, Travis Mills, Tenley Dene, David Wellnitz, Rohan Shetty and Steve Wilson

I saw most of the 52 Films in 52 Weeks at the three day festival that debuted them to the public, and not one of them stood out as more immediately and obviously meaningful than The Bum, a 1929 story by W Somerset Maugham originally titled The Derelict. Even before it finished, I was intrigued as to how much of what's on screen is what Maugham wrote and how much what Mills brought to his adaptation of it, as it's impossible not to read it as the Running Wild Films manifesto. That interpretation is aided by real life observations. This was the first of these 52 films to feature Mills himself as a prominent character, not as the lead but as the most important character in the film. The first day of shooting, which took care of the present day scenes, is why he cultivated a memorably bushy beard over a number of months, one which got ever bushier with each succeeding episode of the webseries they shot during 2013. Once done, that beard was promptly shaved so he could shoot scenes the next day set years earlier.

Mills plays the bum of the title, in which form he never speaks. He just wanders around, looking unkempt and notably intense. In another story, we might believe he was dealt tough cards or abused a substance or three, but not this one. Here, he's the architect of his own destiny, through sheer stubbornness. To find out how and why, we have to meet him through the eyes of the real lead character, Barry Connor, played by Eric Almassy, who's really good at being the visualisation of a narrator, the person who experiences a story on screen along with those of us watching at home, without necessarily playing a part in it. Here he wants to be a writer, but he doesn't seem to have the drive to make it happen. Perhaps he's more in love with the idea of having written than actually going through the process of writing. As we meet him, in the present day, he's taking a couple of weeks off to write, which may just mean reminiscing through the box of old stories he keeps out of sight because his wife wants to throw them away.

The connection between the two almost happens when Barry is sitting at an outdoor table thinking while his wife shops. Enter the bum to look for scraps on tables, bundled up in a hoodie but with those piercing eyes and bushy beard. He looks potentially dangerous. He moves on, but Barry has recognised him. He's the centre of attention in the flashback scenes that we watch in colour, as if everything was more vibrant back when Barry and Tom were in college. Tom, sans beard but with just as intense an air, holds court in an auditorium, three other students hanging on his words. Somehow he's relaxed but angry, denigrating the validity of the professor who's been giving them advice because he's never been published, at least not really. Barry and the others are unnerved, as if they know they should agree with Tom but don't have the courage to dive down that rabbit hole. Further conversation backs that up and it all feels exactly like Mills's views on film schools and professors who only teach, never do.

Barry says he wants to be a writer, but his writing revolves around classwork. He's inquisitive enough to ask Tom for feedback on The Desert Stranger, the story he pulls out first in the present day which sends him back to these flashbacks, but Tom doesn't give him the critique he expects. He asks why he wrote it, whether he'd have written it outside of class. Barry doesn't have answers to questions like, 'Where did it come from?' Tom believes that writers write because it's who they are, not because it's who they want to be. 'It should be coming out of you,' he enforces. 'It should be coming from your gut.' This dialogue is all the more magnetic because while we're hearing from Tom, we're clearly also hearing from Travis. There are scenes in the 52 Films in 52 Weeks webseries where Mills sounds just like Tom, driving and analysing because the best education is doing. That's what this project is all about, releasing the films that burn to come out of him and, in the process, making him a better filmmaker. It's learning by doing.

Barry Connor doesn't understand and Eric Almassy captures that well. He's a little too loose in the earlier scenes but in the flashbacks he reacts just right. Half of him wants to reject Tom's arrogance, but half of him wants to adopt him as his guru. None of him realises that his dreams aren't going to lead him where he wants to go because he doesn't have the passion. Instead he turns on Tom when he says that, 'I don't have any answers' and tells him that he's going to end up a bum, which of course he does. This is the old paradox of integrity: if you compromise, you might just succeed and be able to create professionally as a living; if you don't, you might never get anywhere but you'll still be true to your artistic vision. Many may see the last scene as a suggestion that you have to compromise that vision or you'll burn yourself out. I see it differently, that Barry's compromise inevitably led him nowhere while Tom's still true to himself, as a bum writing in puddles in the park. Each sees the other as worse off than them. Who's right?

Maugham's story leaves that question as open as Mills does, but cloaks the idea subtly in religious garb as if the bum his narrator meets in Vera Cruz, Mexico and who he eventually recognises as the confident and arrogant writer he knew decades earlier in Rome, has Christ-like attributes. The narrator realises that 'he had sacrificed everything to be a writer,' but for whom? Is he merely suffering for his art or for that of others, like the man who tries to help him but is rebuffed. Perhaps this act of charity, after the symbolic three days, is what will save the narrator instead, who began by lamenting 'that I had not half the time I needed to do half the things I wanted.' Perhaps he'll now make the time, if only out of shock. Barry might do the same, because Tom has at least lived and experienced. Maybe Barry might have achieved without the distractions of an easy life with a job and a wife who thinks old stories should be thrown away. Maybe he should reevaluate his dedication. Maybe he can write the sequel to The Bum.

I have no idea how much Mills has sacrificed for his art, but I know that making 52 films in 52 weeks isn't an easy task and it surely involved a great deal of sacrifice. This challenge was about creating new films, however easy or hard the task at the time. Sure, some films might just flow easily, especially to someone who had already made fifty or so, some of them features, but others wouldn't. We've already seen that in Catastrophe, The Return and Araby, but there were challenges here as well; this time the crew were able to use the rain to their advantage. Mills chose to shoot the present day scenes in black and white but the flashback scenes in colour. Clearly one reason is just to delineate between them, but I doubt that's it. Are we merely enforcing that Barry's ambition has faded over time or are we highlighting how his options are more polarised and obvious? Perhaps if he makes the right choice, to let his passion loose and write what he perhaps aches to write, everything will shift back into colour. Maybe Tom saw it that way all along.

Director: Scott Schirmer
Stars: Gavin Brown, Ethan Philbeck, Phyllis Munro, Louie Lawless, Alex Kogin, Angela Denton and Shane Beasley

This film was an official selection at the 9th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 films.

Scott Schirmer deserves a lot of respect and not all of it is due to the fact that he made this feature for as low a budget as $8,000. More is because he adapted it to the screen from a self-published horror novella in collaboration with its author, but most is because, two years earlier, he took the effort to write a review of that novella at Amazon. It's Found by Kentucky writer Todd Rigney, who published it himself back in 2004 to 'the deafening sound of crickets'. Well, one of those crickets was Schirmer, who explains in his review that he found it 'quite by accident' and 'could not put it down'. He appreciated 'the bleakest, most disturbing scenarios you're like to read', but also the 'provocative themes and beautiful ambiguities'. It's a meaningful review, one that ably highlights just how deeply he was drawn into the piece. 'I've read the book three times now,' he says, 'and new layers keep unfolding before me.' Schirmer had made a couple of long short films already, but it's not difficult to see that he felt compelled to adapt this to the screen.

I haven't read Rigney's novella (though I really should remedy that fact soon), but Schirmer's adaptation is magnetic from the very first line. 'My brother keeps a human head in his closet,' narrates a twelve year old boy called Marty and that's about as engaging as any movie can start out. Marty is our protagonist, a kid who's being dragged into the adult world whether he likes it or not. He doesn't want to grow up, given that he's been told it'll mean that he won't enjoy horror movies and comic books any more, but he'd sure like to get past the bullying at school. The catch is that he's a curious youngster who wonders about the world and explores it by learning other people's secrets. Mum's are old love letters from some guy called Danny, while Dad's are porn mags in the garage. And, most shocking to us but initially just another adult weirdness to Marty, his older brother Steve keeps severed heads in the bowling ball bag in his closet, a new one every few days. Marty found that out by accident too but can't leave it alone.

Whatever you're imagining the film to be based on that paragraph, you're probably wrong. This isn't a horror comedy, for a start, a juvenile take on 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag. It's not a sick and twisted flick that crosses boundaries just to make us grin. It's not even a fast paced gorefest where Steve works his grisly way through the neighbourhood like an insane Batman and Marty signs up to be his Robin. Really, it's a coming of age flick, one that eschews every bit of John Hughes cuteness because it's telling the opposite story. You know all those movies where the kid hero makes it through one adult thing and suddenly is set for life because he gets it? This isn't that, not remotely. Here, growing up is a slow, traumatising process, where everyone is against you in one way or another and nobody gets what you're going through. Gavin Brown, debuting here as Marty, isn't a great actor in the traditional sense but he nails the tone of his role completely and we're with him all the way, as coming of age moves steadily into disturbing horror.

Marty's a relatively normal kid on the surface, one major reason why he's such a powerful lead character, but there are warning signs throughout. He's a quiet kid who only has one real friend, David, with whom he draws violent comic books. One of his pictures upset his teacher a year earlier, so he's clearly on that invisible watchlist. His teachers wouldn't like that he watches horror movies too, often borrowed from his big brother, but then all the best kids do. He wants to be accepted, but finds that following the rules don't seem to help. 'I get good grades and I do what people ask me to,' he pronounces early in the film. 'They should just leave me alone.' Of course, they don't. He's picked on at school by Marcus Sanders, a bigger kid, and his stooge. Marcus punches him in the stomach one day in the bathroom and only gets a couple of Saturday detentions for it. Marty doesn't have the courage to fight back and his mum pulls him out of school for a couple of days to get over it. You can imagine how well that works.

Marty is rarely off screen and his character is built meticulously, enough that everyone watching is going to recognise something of him in themselves. Even though he's polite, talented and far from stupid, he's not getting anywhere in a social setting because he's quiet, awkward and a little nerdy. His parents aren't much help. Dad seems to care, but he's a bigot with a temper. When he hears about Marcus Sanders, he focuses on the kid's black skin rather than what he did. Mum seems to care, but she's overprotective and babies him. So it's big brother Steve who he looks up to. Steve is quite a few years older and notably cool to someone like Marty. Just look at the posters on his bedroom wall: of bands like Iron Maiden and Venom and movies like The Astro-Zombies, The Deadly Spawn and Wild Zero. There's even a 27x40 of The Taint, one of the more telling ones in this story. The catch of course is that Steve, the cool big brother, the only one who understands him, is also a serial killer. How's that for a tough realisation?

Steve is played by Ethan Philbeck in his only film role and he does a powerful job, especially as he was a last minute replacement for another actor who had to drop out after his family objected to the picture. It's surprising thinking back on the film afterwards at how little he's really in it and how far it revolves around Marty. Even scenes about Steve are often shown from Marty's perspective, even if he's in another room at the time. One of the most telling early scenes has Steve argue with his dad upstairs, while Marty and his mum silently mirror that argument over the dining room table. To Marty, what's being argued about isn't important, just the fact that they're arguing again. Another scene later on does precisely the same thing and turns out to be even more brutally disturbing because we can't see what's happening. We're focused instead on Marty's face, his horror at what's going down and his frustration at being unable to stop it. The best scene in the film may be the tense one that has us stuck under a bed with Marty.

There are a number of themes here that delve much deeper than most horror movies attempt. Bullying is the first obvious one, but that isn't just restricted to Marcus Sanders and the responses that are raised to deal with him. Scenes late in the movie suggest that Marty's dad is a bully too, which perhaps highlights why Marty's the way he is and even why Steve's the way he is. Certainly another theme explores the way that horror movies influence people, a subject close to the heart of anyone who grew up in the UK during the video nasty era. Steve's most overt influence is a fictional (at the time) horror movie called Headless, which he appears to be reenacting, but did it and other movies turn him into who he is? I noticed that he has a copy of Snuff in his VHS collection, which did what Headless did back in the seventies, with a major furore around its supposedly real act of murder, which of course was no such thing. David Alton and other campaigners against video nasties always screamed about copycats, which Steve could well be.

There's a hint at homophobia, but it's only a hint. While Marty has nothing to do with girls throughout, his bullies spread rumours that he's gay and he certainly has hero worship for his big brother, there's no real evidence that he really is gay and Marcus Sanders is committing a hate crime. He's just a bully, throwing out whatever crap is likely to cause impact. There's more of a hint at racism though, as Steve's collection of human heads are predominantly of black women. Whether or not Headless (or Snuff) influenced Steve to do what he does, we're clearly led to wonder if his father's bigotry influenced him too, because surely that's where his racism comes from, even if he doesn't realise it. Perhaps the Daily Mail could campaign against parents as well as horror movies. At this point, we even wonder if Steve's sexualised violence is sourced from Headless, from Dad or some strange conflation of them. As we see this household entirely from Marty's perspective, we know that we're not being told everything and that there's history there.

And, of course, as we wonder about Steve and what really turned him into what he's become, we wonder if we're going to watch Marty going through the same transition. He's bullied already, as Steve may have been earlier in his life. He watches the same movies, perhaps at an even younger age. He's already seen Headless, for example, and he overlays his brother's face onto the perpetrator in his mind. He's gradually being alienated from all authority figures (parents, teachers, pastors) except for Steve, his serial killer of a big brother. He starts the film with one friend and ends it without any. If he isn't sexually frustrated yet, he'll surely get there soon, whether he's gay or not. Even without the final scenes which he appropriately interprets as his life becoming a horror movie, he's being screwed up every which way and we can't help but wonder what he'll become. Will he become Steve in the sequel? Will he take the Lovecraftian way out and go completely insane? Or will he just grow up, if this is all traumatising metaphor for coming of age?

I first saw Found as a festival screener and I was impressed but not bowled over. It was clearly a capable film, even before I realised how minimal its budget, and it obviously had a lot to say, but it wasn't difficult to bring my own expectations to the table and realise how different this was. It's much slower than horror films tend to be, even down to the music, which varies in style from ambient to noise but rarely ramps up from tracks that include the word 'soothing' in their titles. While it was banned in Australia for 'prolonged and detailed depictions of sexualised violence', that's mostly restricted to Headless, the film within a film, and it's far from the most disturbing material, much of which isn't seen but conjured up in our own minds from what Marty has to go through. Watching Found again to review, I realised that it had stayed strongly with me from a couple of years ago, so opened up this time round for me to explore more of its admirable depth and realise just how powerful this story is.

And, unlike those Australian censors who couldn't see past the surface, it's the depth that endows it with its power, not the faux snuff antics of the guy in the mask in Headless, which incidentally is being made into a feature of its own by Arthur Cullipher, the head of the Found effects team. What's disturbing is the realisation that Marty is so thoroughly everyday but enduring so much as he travels through the rites of passage that lead us to adulthood that we start to wonder why everyone doesn't go completely insane when they hit puberty. Suddenly we wonder what's going on next door and next door from them. We ask ourselves how we would react to the apparently minor events that lead up to more major ones, all those little details that we denigrate as minor because we've forgotten how worldchanging they are to a twelve year old. We even put on Steve's shoes as Marty muses about his caring, protective big brother and says, 'Why do there have to be two Steves?' If that isn't real coming of age, I'm not sure what is.

Director: Jeremy Berg
Stars: Trin Miller, Brandon Anthony, Andi Norris, Josh Truax and D'Angelo Midili

This film was an official selection at the 9th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 films.

For some reason I can't fathom, Sader Ridge is a polarising movie. It quickly garnered a great deal of love and promptly won awards on the festival circuit, from audiences and judges, and topped at least one end of year list at a genre site. Yet the film was quickly retitled The Invoking for home release, which usually means that it wasn't capturing the audience it aimed for and so needed a marketing makeover. Its IMDb rating dropped massively to the point that the many naysayers debated how low it could go. Well, I'm in the middle. This isn't close to the worst movie ever made but I wanted a lot more from it than it was able to give me. Most denigrators may have wanted it to get going quicker, because it has a notably slow and subtle build and, especially to viewers used to jump scares every ten minutes, nothing meaningful seems to happen for quite a while. I didn't have a problem with the pace and enjoyed the character building, but wanted more background. At 82 minutes, it could have done with another 8 to nail it down tight.

We're here to watch Sam, who's driving into the countryside to take ownership of a house that she's just inherited from an aunt she never knew in the family she didn't grow up with. She's been raised by foster parents, the Harrises, who have refused to tell her anything about her former life that she left at a young enough age to not remember at all. As you can imagine, that rediscovery of who she was will constitute a good deal of the horror story that she's going to find herself in, but director and co-writer, Jeremy Berg, is eager to avoid clichés. This is really a drama that wends its way through traditional horror territory, where each scene seems to show us something we recognise from other horror movies but is approached from a different angle. Yes, this could be read as a cabin in the woods story, but it's far more subtle than that subgenre tends to be. We even open with four young adults in a car, but this thankfully doesn't turn into found footage. The biggest departure from the norm may be that these characters aren't stupid.

For a young lady who was raised by foster parents, Sam seems well grounded, pondering about her past without being overtly inquisitive about it. She realises that they'll lose cellphone signal on their journey, so sneaks in maps and directions to make sure they avoid the usual wrong turn. The car's in good shape, so we don't get the expected breakdown. Mark, in the passenger seat, is her ex-boyfriend not her current one and we don't feel that they'll be drawn back together even if Jessica dumps him over the phone soon into the film. He's a believable ass, up tight and bitchy but able to apologise. He's bright but socially off a little. The cute couple in the back seat, Roman and Caitlin, aren't a couple, even if he'd dearly like them to be; she really does see them as best friends. Roman is nerdy but not stereotypically so, capturing odd sounds for his library on an old tape recorder. Caitlin wears the nerdy glasses we might have expected of him, but she's a little tomboyish, a little hyper, a little free spirit. It's easy to see their connection.

I found the four of them refreshing. They're not doing drugs in the car, mooning other drivers or bitching at each other. They're believable people with realistically cool dialogue and it's great fun to watch them, even though they're apparently doing next to nothing. Ten minutes in, the wildcard arrives in the form of Eric, the caretaker of the property who clearly remembers Sam even if she doesn't remember him in the slightest. He's the one who found Sam's aunt, peacefully dead in her rocking chair, and he's the one who meets them at the gate to show them the property. And, of course, he's the one who's about to introduce us to some of the background that Sam doesn't remember. Her aunt lived here for fifteen years, but took the place over from Sam's birth parents, James and Ellen Sader, who owned most of the land around the house, including the ridge of the title. Sam even lived here too until she was five years old; she played in the woods with Eric, the kid from a property over, five miles down the road.

Thus far, it's a generally believable piece, very old school in its slow character-driven build, the downside being a few darker scenes and the lack of anything except hints at what we might imagine will be coming later. Clearly there's something in Sam's past that she's blocked out, but it takes no less than 41 minutes, literally the halfway mark, for her to get round to asking Eric what happened back when she was five and for him to not answer. There's a darkness in Mark's background too, based on one offhand comment, and Roman begins to react a little strongly to him getting lost in the woods. It's Roman who gets the first real horror scene too, crouching on the steps to the house too scared to go back inside, pitching some sort of fit about what Sam interprets to be Caitlin's plan to travel for six months before finishing college. Yet, as she calls everyone over, he's not there any more. We're 36 minutes in and suddenly we're in the realm of horror, wondering if Roman is possessed or Sam's having hallucinations. Now's when we need to find out the history of the place, because even if the characters don't think in horror movie terms, we do.

It's certainly the growing shift from banal drama to clear horror territory, a very gradual shift but a strong one, that shines brightest in Sader Ridge. Berg doesn't give us anything flash here to distract us from the build and the characters that experience it. He wore a lot of hats on this project, one of which was as the cinematographer, but as capable as his eyes seem to be from the well framed rural stills that pepper the minimalist credits, he keeps his visual work very subtle. There are no ambitious camera movements, not a lot of cinematic angles and relatively pedestrian editing, certainly no jump cuts. That's fine, as he's not going for either art film or mainstream horror movie. He's going for that old school disconcerting tone as we gradually question what's real and what isn't and he's relying on the actors to ground their characters so deeply that we can tell when they're being themselves and when they're not. That's crucial here for us to figure out what's really going on and that's the strongest part of the film.

Trin Miller manages to remain the focus throughout even though Sam is a rather passive lead surrounded by more outgoing, more dynamic characters. Brandon Anthony is particularly impressive as Mark, as he's given two tones to find and he manages to nail both of them, channelling a less comedic Jim Parsons for one and some Alexander Skarsgård for the other. Josh Truax has a similar task as Roman, a more obscure one in which the two tones are a little less distinct, thus a little more unnerving. Andi Norris also has two tones to find but gets less opportunity to do so. As Caitlin, she's the most obvious character in the movie but her other part is more obscure and it took the end credits to tell me that I'd misinterpreted it. As Eric, D'Angelo Midili only gets one character to play and so he seems a little less dominant, even though he's very capable in what he does. I can't say that every actor reached every note, but the way these five act around each other, three of them juggling two personalities, is to my mind a major success.

I was less sold on the story, which Berg conjured up with Matt Medisch and adapted with John Portanova. To be more precise, I was less sold on where it went. I appreciated the basic concept, the way that it built and the ideas that it threw out, but even after a few viewings, I haven't figured out exactly why any of it is happening. I can't talk in depth about this without introducing spoilers, so I'll try to keep it generic. It felt to me like there were two stories here, one in the present and one in the past, one psychological and one literal, one featuring the characters we're watching and one featuring others. My problem is in how these two stories tie together, because they have to in order to work, but they don't seem to fit. The end result to me was a huge image made up of pieces from two different jigsaws. Now, those pieces may fit together if they happen to be the same shapes, but they're still not from the same picture and thus we can't expect that completed image to make sense. Maybe I'm still missing something but I don't think so.

In the end, I think that Berg had all the constituent parts he needed to make a memorable feature, but he didn't put them together right. He had a capable eye, a strong cast and a good location. He didn't have a large budget, but this didn't need one. What it needed was some more imagination to the camerawork; a bit more attention to the sound and lighting, especially in outdoor scenes where night is falling; and a lot more work on the script. The location could have been used better, but the script deserved to be polished a lot more than it was. It felt to me like the first half should have been condensed to be the first third, the second half sped up to be the second third and a whole new emphatic third added at the end that makes some sort of sense within the larger framework. It certainly deserves to be more than it is and I wonder if what was shot matched what was written. Could Berg have run out of cash in his clearly small budget and so shot a quick ending rather than a third act? Inquiring minds want to know.

Director: Arthur Vincie
Stars: MacLeod Andrews, Mina Vesper Gokal, Kelly Sullivan and Derek Morgan

This film was an official selection at the 9th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 films.

It took a while for me to remember Found in Time, even though I first saw it less than two years ago. My notes suggested that I liked the concept but not where it ended up, but I had to rewatch to remind myself of why, perhaps because it takes a while to ground itself and until it does that it feels rather confusing. It begins in a field, for instance, where a young man asks an older Peter Fonda hippie type in a colourful shirt to push him back. He isn't a taxi service, he says, but clamps his large hand onto the young man's face until he falls to the grass unconscious, to promptly wake up on a couch looking at a young lady with a laptop. He's Chris and she's Jina, his fiancée. Well, not quite, because he hasn't given her the ring yet, but he will and they're certainly a couple. He's on meds, somewhat unsurprisingly, but she's his rock so he needs her. And he needs to go to work too, with RJ, who serves coffee from the sidewalk with the aid of a manual typewriter and some electronic gadget. They're not your usual street vendors, by any stretch.

They seem to give people precisely what they need, whether that's exactly the right coffee or a key to a box. Yes, this is a little weird. Then again, Chris seems to pay more attention to a nail he nearly treads on in the street, standing on its head and waiting for someone to impale themselves on it, than he does his rock and almost fiancée. Clearly he cares for her, but he's more than a little distracted, literally. When he touched that nail, he seemed to transport to another dimension where he found himself putting it down. It's quite obvious that something is going on here that we aren't being told about yet and Chris and RJ are at the heart of it. In this world, people go up to coffee vendors on the street and ask for stamina, humility or confidence rather than cups of coffee. In this world, people with blood on their shirts and emptiness in their demeanour buy small rocks for arbitrary prices. In this world, people silently present boxes for Chris to unlock with the first key in his tin and refuse to charge a fee for doing so.

And in this world, cops take photos of them that mysteriously appear on their cameras as the people they might be thinking about. Here's where we really understand that we're not in Kansas any more, Dorothy. I don't know if this world is supposed to be an alien planet that looks uncannily like our own or an alternate dimension that's just that far adrift from us. At this point, it seems almost appropriate that RJ is played by Derek Morgan whose first regular role on TV was as a character called Thomas Gibson, three years before the Criminal Minds franchise launched, with its lead actor, Thomas Gibson and most prominent character, Derek Morgan. To us, this really ought to be nothing but a meaningless coincidence, but the framework of this film almost wills us to search for weird patterns. This is disjointed stuff, with clearly deliberate intent, I'll grant you, but disjointed nonetheless. We're stuck at the level of little Billy, for whom Chris fills a little bag with crayons. 'What are you doing?' he asks. 'How do you do it? You're scary.'

Even the explanations don't explain much because everything is either cryptic or surreal, depending on our point of view. That customer who bought a rock? Apparently the cops beat him up because he might have used it, but he comes back for another one, which Chris refuses to sell. The psych cops would take away their licenses and send them to the Mine. The customer doesn't believe it exists, whatever it is, but Chris claims to be able to see it in the faces of the cops. Either writer/director Arthur Vincie was dropping some serious acid as he put this together or it's all going somewhere, merely collating confusion factors. Making the lead character a psychic is one, but having his mind experience the days in a different order to his body is another. Having characters swap places, depending on how Chris dreams those scenarios, is a third. Having what might be everyone in the story apparently be there for one reason but possibly a few more besides is what makes it quintessential Philip K Dick.

Trying to fathom what this film was trying to tell us reminded me of Dick stories like Time Out of Joint, in which the lead character has a strange profession, lives in a world that's almost but not exactly like ours and who starts to experience weird anomalies that he can't initially explain. In stories like that, what we see is just a front because something completely different is going on behind it and we have to discover what that is. Here, we're not sure who to look at. Should we be looking at the cops, who are over the top and drawn from a dystopia that this world doesn't quite seem to be? Should we concentrate on vendors, which here seems to be a given role as much as a profession? How about the psychiatrists, like Jina, who do their work from behind masks that are rather like welding helmets fashioned by Apple? Clearly we're supposed to watch the characters who appear in more than one category, but at least three of these are identified quickly, even if their reasons are not. If anything, we wonder about the ones who aren't.

It's around the fifty minute mark that we appear to be given an explanation though, of course, we can't be remotely sure that this reality is indeed reality or just another front. The film's synopsis suggests that Chris, who experiences time like a jigsaw puzzle, finds out that he commits a murder in the future, so he attempts to change his past and present in order to prevent that from happening. This may be true, but it would seem to be a massive oversimplification. From what I understood of the story, the key to unlocking the confusion is the realisation that not one but two characters, who are connected in a number of ways, are doing exactly the same thing and their respective efforts are undoing each other's. Floating around that are the people who are somehow monitoring this, at least one of which has their own motivations to change this particular future. Then again, what do I know? I'm experiencing this story as a jigsaw puzzle too and, after taking two runs into this particular trip, I'm still only sure that I'm not sure about anything.

With a story this deliberately fractured, multilayered and open to different interpretations, it has to live or die on other factors. It can't simply rely on the story to hook us because after a couple of times through, I still don't know for sure what that story is telling us. I do like the basics that it uses as building blocks, the idea that in this world, wherever it is, there are people with talents and those talents can be used to form and reform that world. I like that the script refuses to answer our questions but is content to pose others in dialogue. 'What do we really know?' asks Ayana, one of those double characters, the vendor who sets up next to Chris and who sees his almost fiancée for psychiatric help. 'We think we have some say in how things happen?' I also like how some characters remain unexplained and thus open to interpretation, like the hippie with the spider tattoo on his neck. Is he God? Is he some nature spirit, given that we never see him outside the forest? Is he a humanoid visualisation of a place? Who knows? We can argue that all day.

If the story defies analysis, at least the performances of cast and crew are quantifiable. MacLeod Andrews is a decent lead, reminding of Jake Gyllenhaal in both looks and screen presence. He has surprisingly few credits to his name, IMDb suggesting that this is his first feature. Derek Morgan is very capable too, even if his character fades somewhat, to be replaced by Mina Vesper Gokal as the new vendor, Ayana. I'm still not sure about her performance here, as it doesn't seem to find a consistent tone. Andrews acts as if the story revolves around his character, while Gokal seems to react to him and others rather than setting her own stage. I've actually seen her before, in a dubious cannibal vs zombie movie initially called Holocaust Holocaust and later renamed to its tagline, Destined to Be Ingested. This is a better film, but not because she had a bigger part. Kelly Sullivan is better as Jina, though she was much better before we start asking too many questions about who she is and thus what she's doing.

Behind the camera, things are capable enough for us to translate what we see in an attempt to figure out the story. The camera moves oddly, making the whole thing feel disjointed, and the editing enhances the trippy feel. Characters can move in a consistent direction, yet suddenly be somewhere else, whether that can be interpreted as physical, astral or metaphorical. The view often waves around, though in more of a buoyant, floating way than a traditional handheld one. The score is strong, the odd combination of cello, harp and percussion making it memorable. On the negative side, the footage of Chris and Jina interacting on a New York street was clearly guerrilla style shooting and there are too many people obviously looking at the camera for us to focus. The scenes in the Mine are crazy low budget and unconvincing. And I'm at a loss to explain the ending, which feels to me like a huge copout. I think I've figured out most of the plot after two trips through Found in Time, but not all and the ending especially makes no sense to me.

I wish my readers luck in getting further than I did. I'd love to hear what other people read into this film and whether it made sense to them. I'd love to know if the ending felt right to anyone, or if they sat there watching the credits roll wondering if they'd blipped out for a while just as Chris does periodically in the story. To be honest, I'm still not quite sure what causes Chris to experience the world in the way he does and, if it isn't inherent, who's causing it. There are so many questions here that every time I think I've got it down, I start to argue with myself about whether I've understood any of it. Found in Time will surely be right up the alley of those who tend to appreciate complexity for its own sake. I enjoy being treated like a grown up by filmmakers and given something substantial to get my teeth into, but I don't enjoy being led down the garden path by something that can't be explained at the end. I'm not yet convinced that Arthur Vincie understands the story he wrote, but I may end up giving it a third attempt to figure out.

Directors: Gordon Chan and Janet Chun
Stars: Deng Chao, Liu Yi Fei, Ronald Cheng, Collin Chou and Anthony Wong

This film was an official selection at the 9th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 films.

The Four, one of many adaptations of a series of novels by Woon Swee Oan, is an infuriating picture that throws so much at us that multiple viewings are required to avoid getting lost. My first time through was confusing for quite a while, the second was clearer while the third was a lot of fun. I'm fond of it now but it really shouldn't take three times through to grasp a plot. Much of the problem boils down to it being a sort of Chinese X-Men which introduces us to so many characters so quickly that it's tough to keep track of them. Some of it is, however, deliberate choice, as if the filmmakers wanted us to have to watch twice to figure it all out. For instance, we see many of the lead characters in the opening sequence, a one shot CGI deal with a camera swooping and soaring like a bird, literally as we're vaguely following a pigeon for surveillance purposes. They appear like featured extras, enough to stand out from the crowd, marked as people we should notice, but only for a moment before they're gone again and the pigeon moves on.

While we see most of the characters during this opening sequence, we have to wait until the first action scene to be introduced to what they do, albeit so quickly that it's tough to keep track. They all head over to the Drunken Moon, a rather delightful inn, to watch Jia San try to sell a fake coin cast that presumably ties to the rampant forgery going on in the town. A debt collector known as Life Snatcher meets him, but when he realises that their wine is poisoned, all hell breaks loose. Life Snatcher battles another martial arts master, while others use wilder talents to stop Jia San escaping with use of body duplication magic. One young lady in a wheelchair hurls things around telekinetically. Her boss uses qigong power to pull people towards him like a tractor beam. We watch this all unfold at lightning speed until they all end up outside, trapped by the constabulary known as Department Six, who descended en masse on the inn and aim to arrest everyone. Only now do we get to the point, that we have a clash of authorities going on.

Department Six are the standard police force around here and they scare most people silly because they exude brutal and militaristic power. They're fond of intimidation tactics and shows of force, which lead to overkill shows like what we've just seen. Their uniforms are dark and fetishistic, as are their headquarters which are vast, echoing and arrogant in their overt worship of power. Their commandant is Lord Liu who runs Department Six through a standard chain of command with four supreme constables. It took me a long while to realise that these characters, who were introduced much earlier than this, are not the Four of the title. Then again, this is an origin story, so we're watching how the Four come together and where they fit in the grand scheme of things. At this point, one them works for Department Six; he's Cold Blood, the master who fought Life Snatcher at the Drunken Moon, but he's about to be publicly fired but secretly tasked by Lord Liu with infiltrating the Divine Constabulary, the secret organisation we've just met.

The Divine Constabulary couldn't be any more different than Department Six if that was the basis of its funding. I loved everything about them except the contradiction that sets them up. Apparently, they're a secret police force, small and select, which reports directly to the emperor through their calm, polite and humble leader, Zhuge Zhengwo, the man with the tractor beam power. Department Six haven't heard of them, so plan to arrest them at the Drunken Moon until the Prince arrives and orders Zhuge to show Lord Liu his imperial badge of office. Yet this secret police force hitherto unnoticed has their own headquarters in town with a sign on the door reading 'Divine Constabulary'. That anomalous sign notwithstanding, it's a glorious place. It's utterly organic, a light and inviting home full of wood and paper, space and curves. Nobody wears uniforms and nobody barks orders. The atmosphere is one of trust and the group of people there feel far more like a family than a police force.

Having saved Life Snatcher from arrest by Department Six, Zhuge invites him to stay, to become one of them. He wants to leave, but is suckered into staying through flattery and wine. Lots of wine. Aunt Poise from the Drunken Moon brings good wine and they drink for free. With Life Snatcher under their roof, the Divine Constabulary now have three of the Four within their organisation, the other two being Iron Hands and Emotionless. Emotionless is the more obvious; she's the telekinetic girl in the wheelchair, who sees into people's thoughts and quantifies the strength of their qigong power. To go where she can't, she also has a bird, a pigeon called Skywings who led us on that merry dance through the sky to show us the key players during the opening credits. Iron Hands is their blacksmith and carpenter, who can forge glorious devices for the group, including a wonderful wheelchair/Segway for Emotionless to power with her mind. Presumably he built the secret doors and awesome steampunk library too. I want.

There are many others, but those are the major players because they're ranked among the Four, even if that doesn't seem to be official nomenclature. They're colourfully named, of course: Big Wolf, Dingdong, Guts and Bell, who in the form of Tina Xiang may just be the cutest creature I've ever seen. And into their ranks comes Cold Blood to shake everything up. He isn't merely a Department Six constable undercover, he's also some sort of moody beast man who was raised by wolves and he quite obviously has the hots for Emotionless. Other key players include Ji Yaohua, the leader of the ladies hired into Department Six at the beginning of the film, on the orders of the Prince, and Lord An Shigeng, the God of Wealth, who she's really working for and who's clearly highlighted as the villain of the piece very soon into the picture. Lord An has the coolest moves yet: the ability to freeze people or burn them alive at a single touch. Stopping a martial arts master from killing you with his sword by catching it in your teeth is a pretty neat trick too.

With this dizzying array of characters finally introduced in about a quarter of the film's two hour running time, we can start to watch their dynamics click into gear like a clockwork plot. Sure, this may all happen against a cool background of imaginative locations, wirework fights and Machiavellian intrigue, but really the plot isn't particularly interesting. We know after twenty minutes that it's all going to come down to a big battle with the big boss, Lord An, and given that this is the first part of a planned trilogy we know the good guys at the Divine Constabulary are going to win. This knowledge lessens the tension and renders some of the subplots meaningless, like the battle between Department Six and the Divine Constabulary. Like the heroes are ever in danger of losing their mandate to the local guys? To be frank, at this point, do we even care about the rampant forgery plaguing the town? Again, we know that's all going to get taken care of one way or another. We're too busy watching the people.

Ronald Cheng is the most engaging of the Four as Life Snatcher. He's a prolific actor who always provides good entertainment and he works well as the will he/won't he outsider who is always going to join in the end. Collin Chou has promise as Iron Hands and absolutely looks the part. He's the least used of the Four, so it's the writing that lets the character down rather than the actor. The moody stylings of Liu Yi Fei and Deng Chao as Emotionless and Cold Blood respectively might endear them to a particular demographic but I found them less interesting because they're a notably emo couple. Above the Four is Anthony Wong as Zhuge Zhengwo. He's by far the most experienced member of the cast, typecast for years as notably outrageous villains, not least in his first Hong Kong Film Award winning role as the serial killer who baked his victims into meat pies in The Untold Story. He steals every scene he's in here by being the opposite of outrageous, making us very aware that he has immense power but keeping it constantly in check.

On the side of the villains, Wu Xiu Bo is delightfully cocky as Lord An, at his best when he's commanding an army of reanimated corpses. Jiang Yi Yan is more vanilla as Ji Yaohua, not particularly memorable until her fight with Emotionless, which is highly entertaining. As an origin story, there's less attention given to the villains though and far more to those little dynamics between the characters that will no doubt work as ongoing subplots throughout the sequels. Lord An is more apparent here than, say, the villains in the Guardians of the Galaxy movie, another origin story with an ensemble cast of characters, but he and his minions clearly don't get the attention that the ongoing heroes do. The biggest problem the script has is in its attempt to cram so much in, because we'd appreciate so much of this all the more if we didn't miss it by blinking. It's fine for us to miss little background details, because that sort of thing will draw us back to watch again, but losing introductions and key plot points like explaining the title is unforgiveable.

And, at the end of the day, the speed at which this unfolds is both what is most memorable about the film and its biggest flaw. The fights are cool but they're so frantic that we often can't catch what's going on. It took me two viewings to nail down who some of the minor characters were, why they were in the picture and what purpose they served, all because they're skipped over so quickly. Here's a key scene in the plot, but don't dally on it because here's another one and, if you didn't catch the first one, the next three won't make any sense at all. On one level, this would have worked much better had it been slowed down to fit a four hour mini-series instead of a two hour film. Perhaps I should seek out the TV series on the Hong Kong channel TVB, also titled The Four, which ran for 24 episodes of 45 minutes each. Then again, if we could easily figure out what's going on in a slower version of this film, its other flaws would become much more apparent and those are even more problematic.

Put simply, while this is a Chinese wuxia movie whose trappings couldn't be mistaken as being from any other culture, it's notably reminiscent of western superhero movies. The fact that I much prefer the look and feel of pictures like this to anything I've seen in a Marvel superhero movie doesn't mean that it isn't acutely derivative. In what is becoming a sad trend, this is a Hollywood action movie in Chinese clothes, for all that the source material was penned by a Malaysian Chinese novelist who studied in Taiwan and lives in Hong Kong. It's formulaic stuff which tries to cloak its unoriginality in its blistering pace but fails because the more interested we become in the characters, the more we realise that their powers aren't traditionally Chinese, they're just mutant powers from X-Men and its like translated into vaguely Chinese characteristics. Zhuge is Professor X, the Divine Constabulary is his school for mutants, Emotionless is a Rogue/Phoenix hybrid and so on. If you can get past that, this is fun action fluff. After enough viewings.

Director: Eron Sheean
Stars: Michael Eklund, Karoline Herfurth, Tómas Lemarquis and Rik Mayall

This film was an official selection at the 9th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 films.

This multinational science fiction thriller, shot in Germany by an Australian with a Canadian playing the lead and prominent supporting roles for German, Icelandic, British and Japanese actors, takes a worthy new approach to its genre and gets a lot right. Like all the best science fiction, it tells a quintessentially human story within its scientific framework, this one centered around communication, which here goes a lot further than merely the ability of people to talk to each other. The film's director, Eron Sheean, within a Q&A during the picture's US première at Austin's Fantastic Fest in 2012, explained that it was 'about a breakdown in communication, both on the surface in the characters and internally with the cells.' If our innate ability to communicate is what moves us forward as individuals and as a race, the lead character, Dr Geoff Burton, quickly sets the stage to move in the opposite direction as he's socially broken, unable to talk to his ex-wife, his ex-mistress turned new co-worker and pretty much anyone else.

The good news is that Burton is played by Michael Eklund, who turns in a stunning performance one year before The Call but two after his role in Xavier Gans's The Divide, surely cast here because Sheean wrote and produced that picture though it's this one which promptly became his demo reel. Initially he's a little reminiscent of Aaron Hotchner in Criminal Minds in the way that he's clearly very bright and capable but also very insular, but as the script lets loose on him with brutal irony, he loses that clinical air. As the plot escalates, Eklund's acting escalates with it so that his character falls apart with starkly believable effect. Before we get to that point, of course, we're supposed to see his potential as both that future nightmare waiting to happen and as the new research scientist at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany. He was invited here by its head, Samuel Mead, in the form of a very serious Rik Mayall, looking more like a politician here than he ever did as Alan B'stard, MP.

Burton has moved to Dresden for two reasons. One is that he's a very talented scientist, notable for work at the University of Massachusetts on the early detection of embryonic abnormalities. Originally he was a bacterial biochemist, but was drawn to genetics because of his son, who suffered and died at the age of a single week from a rare genetic mutation that now bears his name, Burton's Syndrome. The other is that his work had become entangled in what Mead describes as a 'politicised environment' back in the States, where he couldn't be fired outright but could have his funding progressively restricted until he quit of his own accord. He'll have more freedom here to pursue his work, though he's quick to explain to audiences that his pre-screening of embryos does not mean that he's practising eugenics. This is Germany, after all. Of course, this is a movie so there are plot points waiting for him in Dresden too, less believable but more cinematic in their ability to spin a yarn around Burton and his work.

The one he knows about is Rebekka Fiedler, his former intern and mistress, presumably a strong reason why he's no longer married to his wife, who is now pregnant by her new man. What he doesn't know yet is exactly what Fiedler has been doing in her work to regenerate limbs or what a previous partner, Jarek Novak, has spun that work into in a secret lab in the bowels of the institute. Naturally, he'll find out soon enough, given that the reason Mead reached out to him in the first place is the condition of her research. She's been achieving wonders with axolotls, regenerating limbs at rapid speed, but she's been unable to transfer that success over to mice, which are Novak's specialty. Of course, it's not rocket science to see where this is going to take us, but it unfolds against the backdrop of two key ideas, both outlined during Burton's first lunch at the institute. The first comes from an odd but endearing duck called Chiba, while the second comes from Novak himself, keen to the degree of fanatical.

Chiba reconstructs the skeletons of the fish he eats in the cafeteria, because he likes to see big pictures. Too many of us talk about food but not how it got to us, naturally echoing how many of us talk about the cures that medical science can provide but not the research it takes to perfect them. In other words, the end does not justify the means, even if we shroud the means in mystery and pretend that the end was always the beginning. Novak plays up how he's the same as Burton, because of 'taking risks, whatever it takes, new brave world.' His personal dream is to harness the distribution power of mosquitos to spread vaccines to the populace rather than disease. Rather than eradicating the problem, why not use science to transform it into the solution? It's an enticing concept, but while Chiba feels grounded but interesting, Novak, with his stereotypically sinister bald head and expressive eyes, feels overly eager and freakish. I like the combination of these two ideas, which ground the film neatly.

There are other strong aspects to the film. The pace is slow but measured, somewhat like Burton himself and the work he does. I've read that Errors of the Human Body is unparalleled in the accuracy with which it depicts 'the look and feel of a high level research lab', to quote an IMDb review. Of course, much of this is due to Sheean's access to the real Max Planck Institute as an artist in residency. He developed the film over six years at the institute and was gleefully happy when they agreed to let him shoot it there. This is why the colours are so interesting, very clinical in tone. We might expect gleaming white everything from generations of hospital shows on television, but these shades are more blue and green. Much of the look is the colour of brushed steel with a little bit of light against it. However, that accuracy surely owes some of its success to the pace, which refuses to leap from breakthrough to breakthrough like levels in a game and unfolds with the patience of clinical testing in which every negative result is important as well.

The varied cast help to ground this too. Just because this is a German institute doesn't mean that each of the scientists working there have to be German. Eklund is Canadian, but his odd accent is appropriately a hard one to place, given that Burton presumably moves wherever the work takes him. Karoline Herfurth is German, though she's fluent in the English language and starred in English language productions before this, such as Tom Tykwer's Perfume: The Story of a Murderer and the Kate Winslet movie, The Reader. It's somewhat telling that Herfurth buries Rebekka so deeply in her work that we don't think of her outside it, even though she once again hooks up with Burton in Dresden. By comparison, Tómas Lemarquis screams for attention as Novak, not only because he escalates him up the fanatic scale, but because he's cast so stereotypically. This Icelandic actor without a hair on his head is the very image of science unbound, but he deserves praise for his acting rather than just what he looks like.

The negative side begins with the convenience. Even if I can admire the irony that pervades later scenes and a blistering realisation of the past that comes along with it, I have to acknowledge that it only works because of a stacked set of plot conveniences that are too contrived to buy into. The scientific grounding of the film, which extends so far as a useful PDF download, is seriously stretched by the later scenes that are grounded by their cinematic impact rather than their science. Of course, many will prefer the thrills of the third act to the slower build which aims for coldness, clinicality and distance rather than eye candy. I recently revisited The Astronaut's Wife, a picture which ultimately fails because it achieves the sense of alien detachment that it aims for and so detaches the audience as well. Sheean keeps us more engaged, but he doesn't seem sure who we are. This doesn't work as a horror movie, as horrific as a few moments are, and it doesn't offer the tension of a thriller. Even as sci-fi, it's more sci than fi, then more fi than sci.

In the end, it's really a drama, albeit one that's so drenched in science that it ought to shimmer with dry ice like the experiments in the Planck Institute labs. The technical details gradually reveal themselves to be background, while the themes take over, and most prominent among them is the guilt that's haunted Burton since the death of his son. Perhaps he was a great scientist before that, but we can only presume that it led to his adultery, his divorce, his banishment from American science and the errors he makes in this film both as a scientist and a human being. The title serves double duty, highlighting the mutations that drive his work but also its lead character with all the little obsessions that chip away at his genius. It ends up as a character study, brilliantly portrayed by Michael Eklund. The science that drove the film's creation simply can't keep up with him, which is why it eventually disappoints as a story but never as a performance. Sheean showed promise here, but Eklund's career should skyrocket.

Director: Lucas Figueroa
Stars: Fabio Cannavaro, Amadeo Carboni, Emiliana Olmedo, Giulio Baldari, Victor Menegas, Nicolo Urbinali and Tiziano Scarponi

This film was an official selection at Phoenix FearCon IV in Tempe in 2011. Here's an index to my reviews of 2011 films.

This Spanish film, made in Italian by an Argentinian, claims to be a horror movie but really isn't. Certainly it's the horror movie with the least horror to ever play the Phoenix Fear Fest. However, it's a gem of a film that impresses from its ambitious first shot which runs a full two minutes without a cut. We follow a prison guard down a corridor to turn off a radio, to the annoyance of the inmates who were listening to a football game, then turn to reverse down a different corridor, as those prisoners are let out of their cells. When we run out of corridor, we keep going through the bars of a window, soaring over the Italian countryside and eventually dropping down to the street in a village to watch a few kids beating the wall of a house with a besom brush. We soon discover that we didn't just travel miles, we also travelled thirty years, as the kids are the prisoners. That shows a heck of a lot of ambition, echoing other ambitious opening shots like the Orson Welles cut of Touch of Evil or Max Ophüls films like La Ronde or The Earrings of Madame de...

We quickly find out what's going on, in a stylish progression backwards that highlights how that opening shot wasn't a one off. A day earlier, these kids are kicking a football against the very same wall, which is annoying to the old lady on the other side, knitting alone in her rocking chair, given that it's rattling her framed photos. It's even worse on this day because they're kicking a makeshift ball that hurts their feet with its weight. They do have a real ball, but we need to back up another day to discover what happened to that. One of the kids saved up a whole year to buy it but made the mistake of letting his friend take a penalty kick, given that he's completely useless and misses the wall entirely. It bounces along the spikes on the old lady's iron fence, drops inside and breaks one of her flower pots. They ask for it back and she obliges, after stabbing it brutally to death with her knitting needles. 'Perché?' the kid shouts at the gods as she retreats grinning inside and the camera launches itself past the title screen, back to the future.

I've seen many short films whose titles don't appear until the very end, just before the closing credits, but I don't recall seeing one whose title appears during the second half of the film. What I've outlined above is the introduction, setting the stage for what the kids do for revenge, beginning the moment that we first met them. I suppose this is the horror angle to the film, if you can call it that, but it really doesn't have a horror tone. This is drama, pure and simple, pitting poor kids doing what they love against the old woman who they've been tormenting. Revenge begets revenge and we know where they're going to end up after it all goes down, but we can certainly enjoy how we get there. The camerawork of Javier Palacios keeps it spectacular, the kids are as engaging as they are arrogant and the music is a glorious thing, a character of its own, mixing mambo energy with the traditional opera to accompany the beautiful game. Best of all, it plays along with the creaking of the old lady's rocking chair and the pounding on her wall.

None of the characters are named, so I have no idea which actors play which parts, except that Emiliana Olmedo is the only woman in the cast so is surely the old lady. Pattern spotting tells me that the first two names are the present day prisoners, while the last four are the kids, but only the internet tells me which prisoner is which. You see, one of them is a rather famous name in Italy, if not my household. He's Fabio Cannavaro, the professional football player who led Italy to victory in the 2006 World Cup, the same year he won as FIFA World Player of the Year. Clearly he was having fun by being in this picture, given a long prison sentence where he's stuck with friends who can't kick a football to save their life. Just how Lucas Figueroa, the writer and director, landed him for this project, I have no idea, but if there's a way to make the film any more memorable, that's surely it. At the end of the day, whether it counts as a horror movie or not, it was a great way to kick off Phoenix Fear Fest IV in 2011.

Because There are Things You Never Forget can be watched for free online at YouTube.

Director: Rosa Márquez
Stars: Arantxa Peña, Javier de la Torre and Polina Kiryanova

This film was an official selection at Phoenix FearCon IV in Tempe in 2011. Here's an index to my reviews of 2011 films.

Spanish shorts accounted for four of the eleven screened at FearCon in 2011 and they were an agreeably diverse lot. This one played well, but it suffers from being a little obvious, especially if you can speak the language. The title translates to Dolls, and that's what we see as it begins, at least in an old slang sense. Ana is the tall girl hanging by her tied wrists from the roof of a stable; her legs are tied as well. She's in a striking outfit, all red and black and skin. Her bra, her high heeled shoes, her skimpy top that covers her shoulders and her lips are all hooker red, while her short skirt and her hair (at least in this dim light) are black. She's likely to be a lady of the evening, but she could just have been out for a really good time. It doesn't matter which, of course, as she certainly wasn't expecting to be kidnapped. Chained to the floor and cowering in a skimpy white nightgown is Irina, if her gold necklace is anything to go by. She's scared out of her wits so not much help, but she might be even prettier behind all the tears.

I wouldn't offer a prize for figuring out where this goes for a while. When the man who took them arrives, Irina babbles while Ana shouts. She drinks the water he pours down her throat though, which knocks her out for the night. In the morning, she finds a way to free herself and climb out of the stable, impressively never losing her high heels. To her credit, her first thought isn't escape, it's Irina, so she goes in search of her fellow prisoner. What she finds in the main house isn't at all what she expects as she and we discover the other meaning of the title. From that point on, the surprises are over, but it plays out capably with a neatly freaky final scene, courtesy of actors Geli Albaladejo and especially Javier Botet, who isn't willing to let the wheelchair to which he's confined restrict his perversions. Writer Javier Gonzáles and director Rosa Márquez deserve credit for wrapping up the picture when they do, as it could easily have continued on for a lot longer and spoiled the ending. It finishes exactly when it should.

The cast are capable, though hardly spectacular except for that freaky scene. Arantxa Peña does a good job as the lead victim, not quite the damsel in distress she could have been. She tries valiantly but fails to ensure that her acting ends up more prominent than her outfit. Polina Kiryanova doesn't get to speak, at least not in a language that we can understand, but she sells her part superbly nonetheless. Javier de la Torre is fair in the role that ties everyone and everything together; he does achieve that but not much more. True, he's cast because he's a believable monster without ever looking like one, utterly everyday. The camera is jerkier than it needed to be at points, surely aiming to visualise some of Ana's panic but overdoing it. Other than that, the film looks good, with decent locations, a good score and a characterful song to accompany the end credits, Cat Power's Werewolf. This is a good film if not a great one, but it's enough for me to be interested in seeing Burocracia, which Márquez made with Albaladejo a year later.

Director: Travis Mills
Stars: Holly Dell, Jessica Bryce, Seth Gandrud and Donald H Steward

Even though You Touched Me screened in the very first set at the 52 Films in 52 Weeks festival, closing up the opening night selection, it stayed with me in much more detail than most of what followed, and I was keen to find out why. I wanted to know what D H Lawrence was saying in his short story and what Travis Mills excised to make it fit into a short film. I especially wanted to discover what the character of Hadrian meant, as Seth Gandrud had little to do in the film but somehow owned it regardless. What I found was that this is one of the more interesting adaptations of the whole series. While Mills retained Lawrence's title and the scene that warrants it, along with character names and a little of the dialogue, he rewrote almost everything else entirely. He didn't do so merely because of time and place, as Lawrence's English story, framed as always in the classes, wouldn't be easy to translate directly to modern day Arizona. He changed every dynamic of the story too and replaced the mildly creepy tone with a more uplifting one.

Not one of Lawrence's characters is remotely likeable. He introduces us first to the Pottery House, an ugly affair which used to be a commercial property but is now residential, then to Matilda and Emmie Rockley, two old maids whose attributes remind of their house. Emmie's coming up to thirty, while Matilda has just passed it, but their attitudes are of much older women, dismissive spinsters waiting for their father to die and leave them everything. Into their life comes Hadrian, as he had done once before. With four girls and no boys, Mr Rockley chose to adopt one from a charity institution, bringing him up as his own. Each of the girls insisted he call them 'cousin', as if it would serve to distance them from his lower class background. They're all framed in class. Emmie and Matilda are unmarried because they feel they deserve better than the town has to offer, while Hadrian moved to Canada so as to be able to escape his class limitations and move up the chain. Mr Rockley sits above it all and plays with the lives of his children.

This depressing tale saw first publication in 1920, soon after Lawrence had begun his voluntary exile from England, what he called his 'savage pilgrimage'. He saw his own country through bitter eyes, as it meant to him poverty, harrassment and accusations. He'd already been investigated on allegations of obscenity, charges that would consistently plague him throughout his career. It's no stretch to read this story as the opposite of a love letter to his country. Thankfully Mills jettisons most of it, replacing creepy manipulation with a more conventional love triangle. He kills off the father immediately, highlighting at the very outset that he's been dead for a couple of days. He keeps Mattie and Emily the same age physically but renders them younger mentally, less isolated and more endearing. Hadrian shows up because of correspondence with his father, so his arrival is a surprise to the girls. Each of the relationships between them are framed in much more positive ways than the bitterness and machinations of Lawrence's characters.

Mills does keep enough substance to avoid this becoming a cheesy romance and wisely frames his story around Mattie rather than Hadrian. Her dialogue is very telling. When the family lawyer tells the girls that Hadrian is here, her immediate response is, 'He isn't blood'; yet when Emily mentions his powerful arms, her first thought is, 'But he's your brother.' Holly Dell is a strong lead, effectively playing two characters who are fighting for control. She's mostly brusque to the point of rudeness, instinctively pushing people away from her, but inside aches to love and be loved; she struggles to let that side of her out. She isn't the old maid of Lawrence's story but, unless she changes, she'll get there. On the other hand, Emily is a soft and giving free spirit, played effortlessly by Jessica Bryce. When the girls are told that Hadrian is in the stable, Emily rushes there to be framed superbly in the doorway, blurry and in soft light because the camera's focus is on him. It's an odd choice but an appropriate one, because it speaks to her emotions.

The two girls are alike in many ways, not least their attraction to Hadrian, but they're polar opposites in others. Emily's heart is on her sleeve, but Mattie's is hidden away deep inside. In many ways, this is why this story works, but it's assisted in no small way by Seth Gandrud as Hadrian. He's a strong man; he left years ago, did whatever, hitch-hiked back from Maine. We get the impression that he could do anything he wants to do, but here he does nothing, just stands there like the cover of a romance novel, while the girls fall apart in front of him, waiting for them to find themselves. He spends his most important scene asleep; it's a parallel to the one in Lawrence's story but switched up entirely to render the title obsolete. Most of his dialogue is, 'I don't mind', his 'As you wish.' Westley in The Princess Bride, was also an active man choosing to be passive for his own reasons. Gandrud is almost messianic in his inherent peace and ability to be in two places at once, but I couldn't find a religious subtext and I looked. This isn't Joyce.

The connections between the original story and Mills's adaptation to contemporary Arizona are one of the more interesting aspects of most of the 52 Films in 52 Weeks. He often had to cut out material, especially from the longer stories and to mixed success. Some of the better films, like The Kiss and Araby, retell the originals in a different way, not just removing material but adding new elements too, whether in the style or the script. Here, Mills rewrote the whole thing, creating a completely new story out of a few elements from the original. Had Lawrence's story been more worthy or Mills's less strong, this could have backfired spectacularly. Fortunately, Lawrence's story leaves a notably bad taste in the mouth and Mills's punches notably above its weight. There's little on the surface, just another love triangle, but there's more going on underneath and it's constructed very well indeed, compact but unrushed: the script, the lighting, the choice of focus. Perhaps Bryce's early scenes should have had a few more takes, but that's about it.

Director: Pearry Teo
Stars: Chad Grimes, Layton Matthews, Santiago Craig, Zelieann Rivera, Zach Cumer and Cole Braxton

Here's a feature that I've been aching to rewatch because, I have to confess, I slept through much of it at the International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in 2009. I've fought sleep often at film festivals, where I'm in front of a screen for fifteen hours a day and talking outside for much of the rest, but this is the only time I really succumbed and, finally watching Necromentia afresh, I understand why. This is not a boring movie, by any means, and the sheer freakiness of it has stayed with me; even walking out of the theatre, I knew that this was a film I wanted to watch properly. Yet it's a hallucinatory dream of a picture that unfolds out of order and refuses to let us engage with it directly, preferring us to sit back and let it infiltrate all of our senses at once. Maybe I wasn't asleep, I was in a trance state. Even watching awake, it's tough to grasp everything that's going on until the end credits roll and then it's worth a discussion afterwards to make sure we got it all. I'm still unsure of a few details, but it won't be a hardship to revisit it once more.

Clearly, Pearry Teo wanted to deluge us with nightmarish hallucinations, a more consistent vision of what Clive Barker's work could have been in Hellraiser, if eventually a safer one too. He begins immediately, as the opening credits unfold in a gothic font to the accompaniment of enticing and often forbidden imagery and agreeably layered sound. As the film proper begins, we see much of the same with further montages blistered at us with editing that's so fast that it comes close to shifting into subliminals. Merely blink and you'll miss things you won't see again. The visuals are notably edited in synchronisation with the music, emphasising the experience of it all over the detail. We're shown a monster immediately, flashing in and out so we can't quite take everything in at once, just some conglomeration of muscles, chains and bulk. A man wakes up in an industrial setting, his back covered in bloody symbols, to be harangued by a weird monochrome figure in a gas mask and vaguely medical antique cagework.

We aren't introduced to this strange figure, but the man is Hagen, initially called to by a whispering girl's voice but then harangued in a barrage of words which echo the visual montages, spoken like a demonic throat singer in tones that are both deep and high pitched, as if they're being issued from more than one mouth. 'Elizabeth is dead,' he's informed. 'You were given a choice.''Tormented for all eternity.''Instead you chose Hell.' By the time we reach, 'You will be punished,' we're shown only blackness. Then we back up to see some of why he's here. Hagen is a strange one too, talking soothingly to a corpse in a bathtub. His glasses are cracked and taped; she has a rictus grin and her hair is starting to fall out. He bathes her anyway and waits patiently for her to return to him. She promised to come back from death, apparently, so only time sits between them now and with it, a routine of 'daily maintenance' to ensure that when she does return, it's as comfortably as possible. Oh yeah, he's more than a few cards short of a full deck.

Now, if this scene wasn't freaky enough, there's a lot going on here to emphasise to us how freaky it's all supposed to be. For a start, it unfolds with a curious colour palette, more yellow and green than it should but with that gangrenous feel somehow appropriate. The metal framework in which he encases her could easily be a home made torture device as much as an amalgam of medical equipment. The camera is an ever-moving thing, rarely staying still even when it's static, as if there's something alive in the air around them. Playing in the background, a little deeper than we expect, is Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, but it sounds more like a music box than a piano and perhaps not entirely at the right speed. Even Hagen, the only active character on screen, squints continually through the attachments that hide his full face and talks his crazy talk in a really quiet, clearly obsessive, voice. The set design here is magnificent and the choices on the technical side are no less, everything tilting us just away from the familiar.

You'll notice that I haven't said anything about the story yet and that's for a very good reason. We really don't have much idea what the story is until at least two thirds of the way into the movie. For now, Teo is content with drenching us in weirdness until the freaky tone that pervades the film is firmly established, enough that we occasionally wonder if it's about to escape it into reality. It's by far the greatest success of the film, because it's notably woven out of each of the elements that might contribute: the sound and the score (which here are often indistinguishable); the camerawork, framing and colour palette; the sets and the props that fill them; the way that everything normal in the script is translated instead into fetish or deviant equivalents; and the effects work, which feels entirely practical and analogue, right down to body painting as minimalist costuming. Everything is designed very carefully so that we recognise each detail that then grows into something else, something outlandish and surreal. We can bathe in it.

As to the story, it's almost impossible to detail any of it without venturing into spoiler territory, because it revolves around four different people, possibly five, who are connected in ways that we don't initially see, but whose connections are eventually revealed. For the most part, the story unfolds backwards, so that if I tell you the basics, which is doable in as few as a couple of lines, it will bypass that process of discovery and affect how you're supposed to experience it. Let me introduce the characters as you'll meet them, so you can attempt to figure it out anyway. Hagen is one, of course, as is the corpse which he's preserving in such a creepily loving manner. We have no idea what he does, but he might be the janitor for a barber's shop. We have no idea what she does either, but she's the Elizabeth we were told about in the first scene with the grey painted gas masked throat singer dude. The other two key players are Morbius and Travis, with the fifth being Travis's little brother, Thomas, who may or may not be even more important still.

We meet Travis early in the film, so there's no spoiler there. He comes to see Hagen, who he shaves with a straight razor forcefully. He's been watching him and what he does with the corpse, so has a proposition for him, one that could bring Elizabeth back to him. He has maps to the borders of the other side; he can find the doors, but he needs a key to get through them and that's where Hagen comes in. As Travis, Chad Grimes is tasked with grounding the acting side of the film. We may have met Hagen first, but he's more of a pawn than a first rank piece; while Hagen is best when he's under someone else's thumb, the actor playing him, Santiago Craig, is best when he isn't, because he can believably veer away from reality into his own freaky mindset. Travis is a more interesting character, because he's dominant over some but the plaything of others. Grimes does well in both aspects, carving people up for a living, caring for his little brother or being talked into things within hallucinations while high on ketamine.

I won't say what part Morbius has to play, but Layton Matthews puts on a magnetic show in this film, both in costume and out of it. If Grimes often resembles Chuck Norris, partly through his facial hair and partly through his demeanour, Matthews more obviously channels Alexander Skarsgård, if you can imagine him as an angel. All the actors deliver here, except Zelieann Rivera, who looks and moves great, but whose delivery is terrible. Fortunately she has the smallest part to play of the key characters, so it's not hard to look past that. Zach Cumer has the toughest role to play as Thomas, a mentally retarded young man who is confined to a wheelchair and contemplates suicide with the assistance of The Mr Skinny Show, which I assume isn't on the weird television that can't tune in visuals but is conjured up instead out of his broken brain. Whichever, the half giant pig, half sumo wrestler who's wrapped in barbed wire and plays carnival music is a genius creation, a notch up the freaky scale from the rest of the freakiness in this movie.

I'm tempted to say that the story is a downside, not because it's bad but because it's given a much lower level of importance than the feel. I adored the feel, but wanted the story to have a little more substance and a little less obscurity. The picture could still function as a dark hallucinatory experience even with an underlying story that makes complete sense or reveals more of itself earlier in the running time. I did like the way that some of the freakiest settings weren't really explained, such as Travis's day job. I've no idea how he'd detail his job description, but it's edgy enough to fit the story and the aesthetic both. When he brings in a babysitter to keep Thomas from finding a way to commit suicide while he's working, he finds another freak who just wants to read his Abasiophilia magazine. Given that abasiophilia is a fascination, often a sexual one, for people with physical disablities, and that the issue of the magazine the babysitter brings is the wheelchair fetish issue, he's hardly a great choice. I like that this is left in the background.

What I would say is a downside is the lack of follow through. Writer Stephanie Joyce fleshes out a story by Teo with panache, presumably responsible for the majority of the agreeable deviancy that populates this picture. However, while Teo conjures up an aesthetic to match that deviancy, with the able assistance of Timothy Andrew Edwards (music), Darin Meyer (cinematography), Damian Drago (editing), Clifton Dance (production design) and Catherine Joyce (art direction), among others, he doesn't seem willing to follow through and show it. For a picture so relentlessly outré, we see a lot less of it than we might think, much of it conjured up through suggestion and clever filmmaking rather than through actually putting it on the screen. The abasiophilia is kept just a freaky background detail just as Hagen's necrophilia is restricted to dialogue, The gorgeous cenobite-inspired monster does little and the gore effects aren't used remotely as often as our minds might remember.

And I wonder why. If Joyce and Teo wanted to be this edgy, why would they stay this polite about it? That to me is the biggest mistake of the film. If they'd have shown everything that they raise, this ought to be a notable cult hit, potentially a thing of legend in underground cinema. Certainly I've never seen a movie with such a consistently out there aesthetic. Hellraiser gets there at points, such as the design of the box and the cenobites (and the soundtrack by Coil that Barker wanted but wasn't used), but it isn't remotely as consistent with its look and feel. It talks about a journey to Hell, while Necromentia firmly suggests we were there all along. In the end, one of its strongest points turns out to also be one of its weakest, that it remains a true horror movie, unwilling to pander to any potential audience and telling precisely the story it wants to tell. This is the one film I wish had lost its restraint and pulled out all the stops. With restraint, it's a powerful immersion into nightmare; without it, it could have been a milestone.

Directors: Shade Rupe & Teller
Star: Todd Robbins

This film was an official selection at the 9th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 films.

Play Dead is an odd film to see at a film festival, given that it's not really a film at all, it's a filmed record of a stage performance. Now, you might be imagining a teacher sitting at the back of a school hall with a camera on a tripod documenting kids performing their summer play, but this is much more imaginative than that, both as a stage performance and a recording of it. That's not too surprising, given that Teller (of Penn and Teller fame) directed the stage show and co-directed this film version of it with Shade Rupe. However, the same flaw applies equally to this and the school play, namely that we can't interact with a recording. That's by far the biggest problem with this picture, as this stage show featuring magician and carnival showman, Todd Robbins is emphatically a participatory one. It sets up all sorts of gimmickry that is surely a riot for those attending in person, but we're stuck on the other side of the fourth wall so get to merely watch the reactions of those who attended. We can't experience a rollercoaster on television.

Teller is a magician, of course, well known for performances where he explains his tricks at the very same time that he's bamboozling us with them. He's also known for his TV show, Penn & Teller: Bullshit! which allowed the duo to debunk dishonesty wherever they could find it, including in such fields as professional mediums. It's therefore no surprise to find him interested in Robbins's interactive throwback to the 'spook shows of the 1940s' where he does both of those things at once, setting up apparent connections to the spirit world that he then debunks as a carnival trick. Robbins's own background strongly fits the material too. He discovered magic at the age of ten and gradually progressed up through the ranks, but because it wasn't paying the bills he sidestepped into the carnival scene, working in a Coney Island sideshow doing all the old time acts: swallowing swords, hammering nails into his nostrils and eating fire and light bulbs. He kicks off this show by chewing up a light bulb with gusto.

Well, technically he kicks off the show by building up the theatricality of the performance, because we're unable to forget that this is a stage event. His first act is to plunge the entire theatre into darkness, right down to switching off the exit signs. Needless to say, there are young ladies in the audience who scream. Then, to introduce 'an evening of spooky entertainment', he gives audience members the opportunity to leave by turning over an hourglass. Once that runs out, the doors are locked. He wasn't kidding: if you're in, you're in; you don't get to skip out halfway through, whatever happens. We recognise gimmickry like this from William Castle, but he only brought it to cinema from the same spook shows that Robbins took influence from here. The sold out audience at the Players Theatre in Greenwich Village in the last days of the show's run in New York weren't passive observers, they were part of the show itself and locking them in merely ensured that they couldn't forget it.

At this point, Robbins was almost a year into the show. After a couple of weeks of workshop performances in Las Vegas and preview shows in New York, it officially opened off Broadway on 21st October, 2010 and ran until 24th July, 2011. However, it felt like he'd been working it for decades, stalking the stage and the theatre floor like a Satanic car salesman, in complete control of everyone in the audience and everything that might happen either to them or around them. He's a massively talented storyteller, which allows him to keep his audience captivated as he selects an apparently random file box from the stacks of them that provide the stage's backdrop and make it look like a bizarre underground museum. He then explores the history of the character whose effects are kept within it, a character with a strong association with death: child murderers, carnival geeks, fake mediums at society sex parties. Of course, that exploration isn't in the form of merely a lecture, it's a full on participatory experience.

The obvious success of what Robbins does here makes me wonder why these shows no longer pepper the landscape, but that's a wider subject than this review should cover. Sure, the elements that he brings to the stage are time honoured ones: Grand Guignol effects, spook show shenanigans, carnival magic tricks and spiritualistic explorations. Robbins approaches them all from a modern framework though, one that's reminiscent of Penn & Teller but with less of the technical aspect and more of the human connection. The material leaps all over the place in tone, but that only serves to keep the audience on the hop, unsure of where it's going to go next. One moment they're subjected to broad slapstick haunted house humour, the next focused in on poignant remembrance, only for nudity to appear out of nowhere. In less able hands, this would have been problematic, but with Robbins in charge, it's merely another way to emphasise how showmen can manipulate emotion. He does it impeccably even while he's talking about it.

Of course, it can't hurt that he talks about it with a clear voice that doesn't merely cajole and command, it even ventures into Vincent Price impersonation as he introduces some of the dead folk who inhabit his file boxes. Perhaps my favourite part arrives when he adds a new one, an audience member called Alan who writes his names and dates onto one of the boxes. I won't spoil how he bites the big one, because it deserves to wait for you to experience it yourself, so let's just say that it's a brutal and bloody act. What I appreciated most was how Robbins harangues the audience afterwards for their reaction to this heinous murder, given their rather different reaction to an earlier trick in which he apparently devoured a live rat. Everything in this show revolves around faith and how it can be manipulated by people with the will and the talent to do so. This is a show; everyone in the audience knows that Alan is alive somewhere, waiting to be reintroduced, but maybe the rat wasn't a trick. The light bulb wasn't, was it? How about the rat?

I won't spoil the other stories either, because they're also worthy of being experienced, but I will highlight that to do that properly, you really need to go to the show rather than find a way to see this recording of one. If anything, it might be worth seeing the show live, then following up with this film, because there are a few aspects included in this recording that you won't get from the live experience. Most obviously, there are a number of points where the theatre is plunged into complete darkness, not only to allow for Robbins's team to scare the crap out of the audience by cleverly exploiting their fears, but to allow us to witness what's really going on through the use of infra-red cameras. Shade Rupe recorded the show with panache before sending the footage on to Teller who edited it into its final form with the comedian and professional athiest, Emery Emery. Clearly video wouldn't work too well with scenes of utter darkness, so the infra-red approach was a key one to make the project possible.

There is a DVD for Play Dead, because I watched one as a film festival submission but, to the best of my knowledge, it isn't available for sale. I wonder if the goal is to restrict screenings to the festival circuit as an advert for the ongoing live show, perhaps suggesting that this will be released as and when the show ceases to be performed live. It would seem viable that it could be sold after the shows as a souvenir that adds a little extra insight to the experience people had just been through. It would seem that there's not just a show here, there's a message too, one that Harry Houdini gave a century ago. Robbins wants us to know that anyone who claims to communicate with the dead is a liar and a cheat; this show helps him to debunk their tricks by repeating and then exposing them in front of a live audience. That message is one that deserves to be shouted from the hilltops and a DVD would reach a lot more people than would eight shows a week. Given the choice, go see the show rather than the film, but this is a good follow up.

Director: Xan Cassavetes
Stars: Josephine de la Baume, Roxane Mesquida, Milo Ventimiglia, Anna Mouglalis, Michael Rapaport and Riley Keough

This film was an official selection at the 9th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 films.

When you're the daughter of pioneering American indie filmmaker John Cassavetes and his wife, actress Gena Rowlands, anything you do in film is going to bring up that connection. Surely one reason why Xan Cassavetes wrote and directed Kiss of the Damned as her feature debut is because it's as far away from anything her father made as could be imagined. John made exceptionally personal pictures, usually in a cinéma vérité style, that were often uncomfortably realistic, constructed out of grit and sweat and sheer acting ability. This is nothing of the sort, instead being a throwback to the sort of arthouse horror movies that only the Europeans made, auteurs like Jean Rollin, Dario Argento or Jess Franco. Like so many of the films Rollin made, this is mostly style over substance, telling its simple story mostly through visual style, building a dreamy atmosphere out of blood, sex and architecture. Casting mostly European actors helps ensure that it sounds authentic to that approach too.

That's not to say that this would be mistaken for a Rollin picture. While a great deal of care and attention is given to make the film feel older than it is, not through artificial aging but through stylistic choices, the anomalies can't be accidental. The very first shot of Djuna has her firmly occupying two eras, watching a Vittorio de Sica movie from 1953 while working on a modern Apple laptop. Before long, she visits a video rental store apparently entirely stocked with VHS tapes, but she's returning DVDs. Clearly, the message is that the movie is contemporary but consciously made in an old fashioned style. This style is everywhere as the film begins, immediately and deliberately setting down its goalposts. The font used for the title is one that could be used on a Dr Phibes movie, as is the colour. We're shown still shots of the countryside, as we listen to a calmly pulsing soundtrack that quickly gives way to some Italian prog rock beats, a soft flute and soon just the wind. Whatever else this is, there's no false advertising to be found.

It's also notably sparse on dialogue, as Rollin's movies usually were, like a silent movie with speech, if that apparent contradiction makes sense. When Djuna catches sight of Paolo in the video store, she says nothing but runs outside as if to escape his charm; of course he follows. Forced to a stop as it's pouring with rain, they swap names and we leap forward to a bar. In a rare talky scene, they swap more in depth introductions: he's in isolation to write a script, while she's staying at a friend's house, translating poetry and literature into different languages, as quintessentially European as her French accent suggests. She also explains that she has a skin condition that prevents her from experiencing sunlight. Then it's to her house, where they watch Viridiana silently and get close. This unfolds without a word until she says 'no'. She makes him leave, even though she clearly doesn't want him to go, then cries in the huge bathtub as the camera backs away to leave her be. All the dialogue could have been told in intertitles.

The biggest problem the movie has is the way that we're supposed to buy into pretty much any aspect of Paolo's character. Initially it was his naïveté which annoyed me but soon it became his motivation. All the poor moments early on tie to the characters, who are poorly written, while all the great ones are visual. I loved the look of the piece: the very deliberate lighting choices, whether they're to make a scene lush or stark; the composition of frame, some shots looking rather like old paintings; the fluid camera motion, such as when Djuna floats down the stairs; the choice of camera angles, like when we look down on the pair of prospective lovers devouring themselves through a chained door. Yet I hated the characters: the way that Djuna and Paolo fall both in love and lust with each other at literally first glance; her weakness and his one track mind; the way he refuses to leave, even when every fibre of his being must have been telling him to get the hell away from this lunatic woman.

She even tells him that she's a vampire fifteen minutes into the picture; he doesn't believe her, of course, so she lets him chain her onto the bed so she can't hurt him. We're enjoying the choice of camera angles and motion even as we completely fail to buy into either character's motivations. Naturally, she changes, fangs and bright contacts betraying who she really is. Yet he doesn't leave; he unchains her instead and walks around in slow motion, exuding alpha male power even as he sets himself up completely to be her victim. He pretty clearly bares his throat for her too as they're reaching the moment. 'I would have done anything to be with you,' he tells her, 'however insane.' I presume we're supposed to be feeling the love and the fantasy and the romance of it all, but we're really just trying to figure out why he'd be so foolish. There's thinking with your pecker and there's not walking away from an admittedly gorgeous young lady when you've known her five minutes and she's shedding tears over how she's going to kill you.

What follows is as clichéd as it is stylish. To underline Paolo's naïveté, he apparently has no clue what a vampire is, so Djuna explains it all with not a single surprise on our part. I can appreciate that they don't sparkle, but everything is so utterly traditional that we wonder what Cassavetes is going to bring to the table. Even here, everything we appreciate is visual, like the way we're given scenes so colour saturated that they could be hand tinted black and white. I actually wondered here if none of this was real and we were watching a visualisation of Paolo's writing process, all extrapolated from that one glimpse of Djuna in the video store. Maybe he's writing a vampire movie but doesn't have the imagination for it. I do like the idea that a vampire and a human can fall in love, but you know, maybe there should be a little more build to it than, 'You're cute, please bite me.' There must be a way for them to do lunch first, maybe out under the stars with her conspicuously only drinking a rare vintage of red wine.

Given how cloying and clichéd it had already become, I found myself aching for something new and not just the abstract blur of Paolo's first kill. I wondered if it was finally going to arrive when a new character drives up to the house 27 minutes into the picture. She's Mimi, another French vampire all dressed up in the Sunglasses After Dark aesthetic, in from Amsterdam to stay for a week on her way to a sort of rehab ranch for vampires in Phoenix. 'She's a disturbed creature,' Djuna tells Paolo, 'a crazy freak'. We're ready for the cutesy stuff to get completely shaken up, because if Djuna is the epitome of a romantic vampire, Mimi is clearly the animalistic flipside of the race and there's no chance that they'll peacefully share the same roof for long. While Djuna is elegance, poise and control, Mimi is wild, emotionless and nihilistic. It does bode well for improvement, but sadly, we're only inflicted with an acute bout of bitchy vampire self loathing, which doesn't help the story in the slightest.

There are good moments to come, but bizarrely none of them are tied to any of the characters to which we've been introduced thus far. We've spent half an hour, almost a third of the running time, watching a pair of characters we don't care about wonder if another character we care about even less will cause a problem for them. At this point, I was mostly wondering if I could ask the projectionist to switch to French language and English subtitles. Most of the good moments revolve around Xenia, a vampire actress who owns the house that everyone else is staying in. At least with her we get something new, a neat vampire take on Alcoholics Anonymous because Xenia, like Djuna, feeds on animals rather than people. It's been forty years without a taste of human blood for Xenia and Mimi's 'a disturbed creature', remember? I like that whole sequence, which is as capably and enticingly written as the rest is cheap and clichéd. Up to then, the best part is that Irene, the housekeeper, is safe because she has a rare blood disorder.

The reason I keep harping on about the writing is that it quickly jeopardises the film and eventually sinks it, the ending proving even more dissatisfying than the beginning. What's so frustrating about the writing is that everything else around it is strong, especially the visual aesthetic which nails its goal to replicate the old Rollin feel. It's telling that even the vampire threesome is boring, not because it isn't shot well but because we have so little connection to anything except the camerawork at this point that we just don't care. Mimi is apparently a centuries old creature of the night, a talented predator, but she acts more like a pouty little thirteen year old girl. At points I seriously wondered if I'd blinked during her sparkling scene. If the primary goal Xan Cassavetes had with this film was to make something so utterly unlike her father's work, so as to establish herself as a filmmaker of her own, she succeeded magnificently. He avoided style and delivered substance; here, with Kiss of the Damned, she did the exact opposite.

Director: Charles Chaplin
Star: Charlie Chaplin, Jess Dandy, Jack Dillon and Peggy Page

I'm reviewing each of the 36 films Charlie Chaplin made for Keystone Studios in 1914 on the centennial of their original releases. Here's an index to these reviews.

From the distance of a century, we can mostly only guess at what went through Chaplin's mind during his last few months at Keystone but we do know some things for sure and others seem like safe guesses. For a start, he was clearly both an ambitious man and a perfectionist, attributes which led his drive to direct his own films. At this point, he had no less than 27 pictures already behind him that had generally done better than regular Keystone product. He had also been his only director for a couple of months and was enjoying the learning process. Each new short during this period seems to highlight how he nailed down a new technique, to build on with the next. The Masquerader, three pictures earlier, was by far the most ambitious film he'd made, allowing him to tell more than one story. With His New Profession, he told his story in more than one location, bouncing around rapidly. The Rounders was an experiment in pacing and The New Janitor combines all those techniques to great effect within the best sets he'd worked on yet.

So Chaplin was moving relentlessly forward, to the degree that this doesn't even feel like a Keystone film or one from 1914. He must have been very aware that he was closing in on the end of his year's contract at the studio too and, as he says in his autobiography, he 'knew the ephemera of it'. In other words, even as his films got better, grander and more consistent, he wasn't counting on any lasting fame, so he asked Mack Sennett for a thousand dollars a week, which his boss pointed out was more than he earned himself as the owner of the studio. Chaplin merely replied that 'the public doesn't line up outside the box-office when your name appears as they do for mine.' Of course, he didn't get it, but Essanay offered him more: $1,250 per week, along with a $10,000 signing bonus, so naturally he jumped ship. This discussion with Sennett appears to have been somewhere in August, meaning that while he was making The New Janitor late in that month, he already knew that he was leaving, even if he didn't know where he was going.

My interpretation of his late 1914 work is that he was learning all he could in preparation for his move to a new studio, whichever it would be. He slowed down to a less frantic and more consistent pace than he had kept throughout the year; both June and August had seen five new Chaplin pictures in theatres, with only one in July, but from this point forward it was two shorts each month, with only one extra in October. Generally speaking, he took longer to make them too, presumably because he could, with a gap between each of them. He still kept a busy schedule, but he was averaging a new picture every two weeks rather than every one, and he wasn't overlapping productions any more. Clearly he wasn't only experimenting with the cinematic toolbox, he was also learning how to produce a picture in a sustainable, professional manner. This progression usually takes new fish years to achieve, but it's somehow appropriate that the madcap factory that was Keystone gave Chaplin the opportunity to do it in only one.

While he devotes little space in his autobiography to his time at Keystone, merely a lone chapter, he does take time to explain something he learned specifically while shooting The New Janitor. As the character of the title, he finds himself at one point fired by the president of the company for which he works, hardly a surprising act given that he's just dumped a bucket of soapy water on him from a dozen floors up in the company skyscraper. 'In pleading with him to take pity on me and let me retain my job,' he explained, 'I started to pantomime appealingly that I had a large family of little children. Although I was enacting mock sentiment, Dorothy Davenport, an old actress, was on the sidelines watching the scene, and during rehearsal I looked up and to my surprise found her in tears. 'I know it's supposed to be funny,' she said, 'but you just make me weep.' She confirmed something I already felt: I had the ability to evoke tears as well as laughter.'' This pantomiming didn't make it into the resulting film, but the feeling did.

What struck me immediately with The New Janitor was the sets, which seem to be much roomier and far more ambitious than I'm used to seeing in Chaplin's Keystone shorts. We start out in the company lobby, with its chequered floor, marble stairs and apparently working lift. The elevator boy, Al St John, is cheeky enough to avoid letting him in, so he walks the twelve flights up to the top floor, which could be the very same set from a slightly different angle, but with the stairs changed. He quickly moves down the corridor outside the executives' offices, with its panelled walls and window to the outside world, then enters one of those offices, with another window and a wall covered with the little drawers that hold cards. Another blink and we're in the president's office, with its prominent safe and a third window. That's five locations in less than two minutes, with different floors, walls and props. That might not seem like much to us, but some of Chaplin's early films never left a single square room.

Of course, these are still clearly sets, the work of the Keystone carpenters commendable but not strong enough for us to buy that we're in a real skyscraper, at least until Charlie almost falls out of the one real window, the one in the president's office. The others are painted, as are the drawers, the panelling and the marbling on the staircases, but it took more work to put it all together, both mentally and physically, than Keystone usually took. The shots of the outside of the building are real, with Chaplin really hanging out of that window; Jeffrey Vance identified it as the Marsh-Strong Building at 9th & Main in Los Angeles, built only a year earlier. John Bengtson, 'the great detective of silent film locations', highlights how close this building is to other locations Chaplin used in other Keystone films, such as His Musical Career, only four films away. This scene is what Vance calls a 'high and dizzy' scene, a couple of years before Harold Lloyd and others would make them popular in comedy films as thrilling as they were comedic.

Once the sets are established, what leaps out are the characters and how they all have a purpose within the script. It's long been suggested that Keystone pictures didn't have scripts at all, just starting points from which to improvise a succession of gags, but that belief was firmly debunked by Simon Louvish's book, Keystone: The Life and Clowns of Mack Sennett, which reprints many of Sennett's scripts. They're hardly traditional scripts with stage directions and dialogue, but they do show how much thought often went into the progression of the stories. I raise this here because I can't remember another picture made at Keystone that screamed so loudly that it had a firmly defined script. Each of the characters is defined, with their own motivations and their own story arcs. Novelist Gini Koch once told me that a writer should be able to imagine their story from the perspective of any of its characters and it's clear that Chaplin set his script up with that sort of idea in mind. He's the lead, but everyone else has their place too.

And there are a few such characters, even if we discount St John's elevator boy, whose part is restricted to forcing Chaplin to use the stairs. There's a villain, one of the company's managers who might work in the office opposite the president's but still owes a lot of money to a bookie. His story arc is established quickly, as the debt is being called in and he only has a day to raise the funds or he'll be exposed. With a safe on the other side of the hallway, it's clear what his direction will be. The president gets to show two sides too, initially a negative one as Charlie accidentally drenches him with the water he's using to wash his windows, but a positive one later on when Charlie comes good during the big holdup scene. Stuck in between is the president's secretary, whose honesty proves to be Charlie's salvation, albeit not because he absentmindedly dusts her backside after the safe. The story couldn't exist without all four characters, but she's the glue that keeps them and their scenes tied together.

Of course, as tends to be the case with the ladies in Keystone pictures, her identity is unclear. IMDb says it's Peggy Page, who Charlie manhandled in His New Profession, and certainly the two actresses look a lot alike. Wikipedia suggests that it's Helen Carruthers, as it did in His New Profession, perhaps because she appeared in so many of Chaplin's Keystone shorts. The BFI claims that Minta Durfee played the part, but it's clearly not her so we can discount that suggestion. Whoever it is, she does her job capably, showing some elegance and charm even before being choked out by the villain, even though she's a second rank player at Keystone like most of the rest of the cast. Her boss and Charlie's is Jess Dandy, who appears in most of Chaplin's films at this point, while the massively experienced Jack Dillon is the thieving manager. He started out in film as early as 1908 and had over a hundred films to his name by this point, albeit with few left to go. So many of these silent actors didn't even get to fail to make the transition to sound.

While The New Janitor can hardly be said to be a sophisticated piece of work today, it was at this point in Chaplin's career. It's less funny than many of his prior films, mostly because the gags refuse to stand in the way of the story and exist to serve it instead. There are some neat ones, such as when Chaplin holds the would be thief at gunpoint by pointing the gun through his own legs while he's bent over double, or when he clambers over his broom when entering the president's office because he apparently can't turn it round; the moments where he nearly falls out of the window are notable too. However, it's much more consistent than his pictures had been up until this moment, lavishly outfitted (at least for Keystone) and thoughtfully constructed. It serves as yet another step forward for Chaplin, in what feels like his cleanest and most progressive picture thus far with one of his more likeable parts. While historically important, it's occasionally difficult to enjoy Chaplin's more primitive pictures, but this one is an easy one to like.

Important Sources:
John Bengtson - Rare Chaplin Scenes in Downtown Los Angeles
Charlie Chaplin - My Autobiography (1964)
Simon Louvish - Keystone: The Life and Clowns of Mack Sennett (2003)
Jeffrey Vance - Chaplin: Genius of the Cinema (2003)

The New Janitor can be watched for free at YouTube.

To see the restored versions of Chaplin's Keystone films in all their glory, it's highly recommended that you pick up the Flicker Alley box set, Chaplin at Keystone. It omits only Her Friend the Bandit, which is considered a lost film, and half of A Thief Catcher, which was previously thought lost but now recovered. The full version debuted in The Mack Sennett Collection Vol 1.

Director: Noriaki Yuasa
Stars: Nobuhiro Kajima, Miyuki Akiyama and Christopher Murphy

This film was an official selection at the 9th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 films.

Tonight we went to the drive in for free movie night, but we left after Guardians of the Galaxy as the other half of the double bill was the reboot of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Once through that mess of a movie is enough for me, so I avoided a second viewing by heading home instead to watch a memorable turtle picture, Gamera vs Guiron, the fifth movie in Daiei's original Gamera series which was released Stateside by American International Pictures as Attack of the Monsters. Even in their television print, in a full screen ratio with an English dub and notably faded colour, it's still a great deal more fun than that latest Michael Bay debacle. Seen as it should be seen, in the widescreen version issued by Shout! Factory on DVD in the original Japanese and with crisp colour, it's a real treat. It's also a wilder ride because it restores the fight scene between Guiron and Space Gyaos to its full glory, one of those gloriously inappropriate moments in Japanese children's entertainment that make us wonder if we're watching a movie or dreaming one.

Now, let's be clear before we begin. This is an awful movie by most standards and it's not surprising that Mystery Science Theater 3000 riffed on no less than five of the eight Showa era Gamera movies. In fact, it did so twice, firstly with a five episode marathon during its initial run on KTMA in Minneapolis, currently the earliest surviving episodes of the show, then again in episodes scattered throughout season three of the regular syndicated show, its debut season on Comedy Central. They riffed on another version of this film, dubbed into English by Sandy Frank Entertainment so poorly that its voice acting became a running joke in itself. However awful the film is, we shouldn't forget that this was a movie for children, with a pair of boys in the lead roles, and, kaiju fans aside, it's easy to see how it would play much better to a young audience. Akio and Tom go on a great adventure, flying a spaceship to an alien planet, where they watch monsters fight, meet strange ladies, get saved by Gamera and return home safely. What glorious fun!

Bizarrely, it starts out in a completely boring fashion, especially for kids, with no less than three sections before we can finally be introduced to Akio and Tom and get down to business. First up is an introduction that effectively lets us on in the scientific secret that space is big, before pointing out to us that a star is in trouble. Then we get the opening credits, which unfold over some sort of lava flow, which I hope isn't supposed to be the star in trouble. Finally, we meet Dr Shiga, in the form of Eiji Funakoshi, who returns to the series after playing the lead, Dr Hidaka, in the first Gamera movie. He's supposedly here to explain to the assembled press that the strange waves from space they're receiving aren't the same ones the Brits are getting. We hear delightfully squeaky space age sound effects, courtesy of some delightfully squeaky analogue technology. Really he's in the movie to explain to the kids watching why none of the planets in our solar system are viable candidates for the source, which is nonetheless somewhere nearby!

Fortunately, we have Akio and Tom on the case. They've been trying to figure out where the waves have been coming from too, using the portable telescope they keep on Akio's balcony. Akio is a believable boy scientist, as Nobuhiro Kajima ably captures a magic combination of knowledge, optimism and discovery. Surprisingly, this was his only film. Tom, on the other hand, who is as Japanese as the name suggests, is very much stuck in the role of Akio's sidekick, Christopher Murphy proving endearing but apparently not capable of actually displaying emotion on screen. He does appear to be fluent in the Japanese language; if he was dubbed, it wasn't by Sandy Frank Entertainment! The kawaii factor is reserved for little Tomoko, Akio's younger sister, left behind when the boys embark on their adventure for no reason other than to be disbelieved when she explains to mum that they tracked a spaceship on their telescope to the vacant lot where they play, cycled over in the morning and promptly flew away in it. That's every day in Japan!

The spaceship is an obvious model, of course, but it's a cool one with huge fins and a revolving top. It's designed in a minimalist style with a few abstract wall designs and a preponderence of triangles, but few actual controls. Then again, it is flown by apparent remote control, even if we're supposed to believe for a moment or two that the kids successfully launched it themselves. We are asked to buy into a great deal here. Given that they're hurtling into space at ludicrous speed, the sparkly meteor that quickly threatens to fly into them must really have been flying backwards at just less than ludicrous speed. Either that or the laws of physics don't apply and we don't want to go there yet, given the early emphasis on science. Fortunately for them, Gamera is apparently cruising in their immediate vicinity and he promptly steps in to save them, before flying in convoy for a while so that we can sing along with the Gamera theme song. Sure, this is a kids' movie, but these plot conveniences aren't just ridiculous, they're blatant too.

Then again, we can't argue too much about little details like this when we're watching a movie featuring a giant, jet-propelled, spacefaring turtle, hardly the most grounded character in Japanese cinema; even Godzilla seems completely believable by comparison. However Gamera was one of the major box office successes of Daiei, one of a half dozen great studios of postwar Japan. They produced Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, the first Japanese film to win an international award, both the Golden Bear at the Venice Film Festival and an honorary Academy Award (the Best Foreign Language Film award hadn't been introduced yet). They produced Teinosuke Kinugasa's Gate of Hell, the first Japanese film to screen internationally in colour; it also won an honorary Oscar and the Palme d'Or at Cannes. They also produced such legendary Japanese films as Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu and Sansho the Bailiff, Yasujiro Ozu's Floating Weeds and the long running Shintaro Katsu series, Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman. Gamera was in good company.

Akio and Tom soon find themselves in bad company. Landing on an alien planet, the first thing they see is Space Gyaos, an alien version of Gamera's most popular enemy painted silver. Gyaos is a giant airborne monster with a triangular head who had been introduced in the third movie, Gamera vs Gyaos, and would return later in the first Heisei era movie, Gamera: Guardian of the Universe, and the Millennium era film, Gamera the Brave. These eras don't denote period Japanese settings, by the way, just the different series that Gamera has appeared in so far: seven Showa films from 1965 to 1971 and an eighth in 1980 as the studio was facing bankruptcy, three Heisei titles in the late nineties and one Millennium picture in 2006. Gamera is portrayed differently in each of these eras, with a different design and different powers. The Showa era saw him released by a nuclear explosion from natural cryogenic storage in the Arctic circle to apparently fly around and save children. He retracts his legs to ignite his jets and is able to breathe fire.

Here's where we get that amazing fight scene that was censored for Attack of the Monsters. It's not a long battle, as the very first blow is a self inflicted injury, with a laser from the eyes of Space Gyaos bouncing off Guiron and severing its own leg. Guiron is an odd monster, not only in how it looks but also in how it fights. Space Gyaos looks like the standard Japanese actor in a big rubber suit, but Guiron mostly restricts itself to crouching on all fours, its huge knife shaped head apparently weighing it down. Then it leaps into the air when the time is right to slice something off its enemy, like the wing it neatly removes from Space Gyaos's body in mid-air, sending it into a spin and a crash landing. Then it jumps again to sever the other wing on the ground, leaving the monster with only one of its four limbs left. Our eyes are already wide as we're not used to seeing severed kaiju limbs wriggling on the ground or spurting purple kaiju blood, but it continues. Guiron decapitates his rival, then proceeds to chop off more slices. Remember, kids' movie!

Of course, we're going to end up with Gamera battling Guiron as the title has to mean something, but it'll take a while before we get there. First, we need to watch Akio and Tom explore the nearby alien city until they run into the only two inhabitants left on the planet. Naturally, they're cute Japanese ladies, but that's amazingly explained, as is their ability to speak fluent Japanese. It isn't explained well, but it is explained! They're Barbella and Florbella, names which ironically translate to Sweet as a Bird and Pretty as a Flower, given that they're planning to eat our heroes' brains and invade the planet Earth with the advanced tech from their dying civilisation. They have teleportation wigwams, a remote control spaceship and a device that allows them to change their speech into any language, really useful when you're the only two people left on the entire planet. Guiron is their watchdog, who protects them from other giant monsters; beyond a giant knife shaped head, he can also hurl shuriken through telekinesis. Remember, kids' movie!

I don't know about you, but when I was six, I'd have fallen in love with a movie where kids accompany a jet propelled turtle to an alien planet in their hijacked spaceship, teleport around an alien city, narrowly avoid having their brains eaten by cute alien women and yet still get home in time for supper. Having a set of monsters like Gamera, Guiron and Space Gyaos is just icing on the cake, especially as it's notably gory icing. You just don't see bizarre monsters counting down to the moment where they decapitate an enemy on Teletubbies or Bob the Builder and they don't feature a single drop of spurting alien monster blood. I could argue that the western world might be a much more interesting place if they did. Don't get me started on Japanese TV shows where child actors get to shoot guns in the holy name of saving their country, their world and their universe. Sure, Japanese children get to spend way more hours at school cramming for exams, but they get wildly imaginative wish fulfilment television, so that's a fair trade off.'

Now that I'm much older than six, it's impossible not to see the wild flaws, leaps and conveniences that pervade this movie, and frankly I'm sure that my grandchildren would see them too. Perhaps I need to introduce them to Gamera movies like this one to see if they find the magic or the stupidity. It would be worth it to hear them singing the Gamera theme song instead of Carly Jepsen or Justin Bieber. I have no idea why Gamera vs Guiron was screened at the International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival, as it didn't tie to anyone attending or any apparent theme. It merely followed another out of the blue classic selection at the 2012 festival, The Brain That Wouldn't Die. That slot didn't exist in the much smaller 2011 event and it wasn't continued into 2014, when the showcase features had plenty of interesting new movies to screen instead. The only classic shown in 2014 was Cujo, with Dee Wallace-Stone there to give a Q&A. Now, I'd have gone to Gamera vs Guiron if Christopher Murphy had been there to talk about it!

Stars: Cary Elwes, Danny Glover, Monica Potter, Michael Emerson, Tobin Bell, Ken Leung, Makenzie Vega, Shawnee Smith, Dina Meyer, Benito Martinez and Leigh Whannell

This film was an official selection at the 9th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 films.

It had been quite a while since I last saw Saw. It was released in 2004, while I saw it in 2005, probably as the word of mouth that quickly built around it had become substantial. While it cost a little over a million dollars to make, it grossed a hundred times that and its six sequels gradually built the franchise into the most successful at the box office of any such horror series. I was impressed, though the sequels gradually fed on each other incestuously and I haven't yet made it all the way through to the latest, Saw 3D, the seventh and currently final film in the series which was released in 2010. I hadn't revisited it since, until doing so around the time of its screening at the International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in 2013, which had executive producer and CEO of FearNet Peter Block in attendance. Eight years was long enough that plot details had either faded from memory or become blurred with the sequels. I remembered the final, particularly vicious twist, but I didn't remember the many others that preceded it.

What I discovered was that it remains an impressive film, notably better than the sequels I've seen thus far, though it hasn't entirely stood the test of time. The fundamental concept still stands up well, a neatly twisted one that has a couple of men wake up in a bathroom, chained to separate walls with hacksaws provided to free themselves, not ones strong enough to sever their chains but ones that will cut through their legs. This is only the first sadistic torment with which they're faced as they gradually discover why they're there, how they're connected and what else might be going on that they can't yet see from their perspective. This concept stands up today, even if it served to introduce the world to the modern torture porn genre. This first film isn't as gory as its sequels and the complexity isn't overwhelming, remaining close enough to the simple vision of its twisted mastermind to ring true. I agree with creators James Wan and Leigh Whannell that it wasn't torture porn yet, even if I don't agree that it didn't get there later.

This one tells two stories that gradually become one. The first revolves around the bathroom, with its two questioning captives and its bloody corpse in the middle of the floor between them that they can't reach. It's a intriguing puzzle, not merely for Dr Lawrence Gordon and Adam Stanheight, the two men inside it, but for us as well. Of course, Lawrence and Adam have more motivation than cinematic inquisitiveness pushing them to figure out why they're there but their actions are cleverly tailored not only to drive their story forward but to draw us into the picture. There are two quick notes that do this very well indeed. Dr Gordon realises that there's a purpose behind their kidnapping and captivity. After all, they could easily have been killed too, but they weren't. 'They must want something from us,' he points out, prompting us to wonder about where the story will take us. Then he notices that the clock on the wall of this wrecked room is brand new, meaning not only that time is important but also that we need to look as much as think.

The other half ties to a police investigation, in which a couple of detectives try to find the Jigsaw Killer, an odd serial killer because he doesn't actually kill anyone, merely places them into darkly ironic situations where they die more often than not. Paul, a man who had attempted suicide by cutting his wrists, was put into a cage of razorwire and given two hours to tunnel a way through it to escape. Mark pretends to be ill to get other people's money, so wakes up with a poison running through his veins that he can counter by taking the antidote that's merely feet away in a safe. There are catches, of course: the combination is on the wall, but there are a heck of a lot of numbers to work through, the floor is covered in broken glass and he's doused in a flammable substance but has to use a candle to read what's on the walls. There has only been one survivor: Amanda, a drug addict, who could only escape the reverse bear trap attached to her head by carving the key out of the stomach of the paralysed man in her makeshift cell.

We soon find that there's already a tie between the two stories, beyond the obvious fact that this pair of captives are clearly going through the latest of the Jigsaw Killer's ironic setups. By this point, we've been let in on how it will work: Lawrence has been given until six o'clock to kill Adam or his wife and daughter will be murdered in his stead. The tie is that Dr Gordon was a former suspect in the police investigation. Sure, he was quickly cleared of being the Jigsaw Killer without any doubt, but the real mastermind behind these cruel acts of irony still chose to set him up. Certainly putting his family on the line is ironic because the alibi that cleared his name also exposed his infidelity; the wife he now has to commit murder to save is the wife he's been cheating on. And so we watch Lawrence and Adam try to figure out a way to escape while hoping that former Det David Tapp, now clearly obsessed with the case, will find them first. And we try to figure out the connections before Wan and Whannell show us their finished puzzle.

However much they reject the suggestion that this film is torture porn, it's impossible to talk about Saw without talking about the sadistically intricate but ingenious traps that the Jigsaw Killer constructs. They dominate the film far more than its stars, the acting or any other cinematic angle. For a start, it's an odd hybrid of horror and thriller that's never entirely comfortable in either genre. It's more gory and sadistic than thrillers tend to be, which has led to frequent and fair comparisons to David Fincher's Seven, and it doesn't play up the tension as a thriller would; we rarely see the clock, for instance. However, it's not a conventional horror movie either. It's not scary, for a start, even if the jump scares are clearly supposed to catch us unawares. It's better as a thriller than a horror movie, especially as it plays it straight, even if a couple of elements threaten to send it into camp horror territory: mostly Adam's occasional attempts at poor humour and a freaky puppet unnamed in this film but known outside it as Billy.

There are major actors in the cast, but nobody really shines on the acting front. I appreciated the choice to tell this predominantly from the victims' point of view, an unusual but highly successful angle, but that means that as Dr Gordon, Cary Elwes is the closest thing we have to a lead and he's done far better work elsewhere. Critics have lambasted him for overdoing it here, but it isn't really that. Dr Gordon is a notably flawed character, a cheat and a liar who isn't particularly good at lying, which makes him seem deceptive all the time. No wonder Det Tapp never buys into him not being the Jigsaw Killer, even though he isn't, as his cop's instinct would be to distrust him. Sure, Elwes doesn't appear to be endowing this role with what we know he can do, but then he's playing a duplicitous character whose every action is a performance. If Dr Gordon was a better actor, then I might buy into Elwes not doing his job. As it stands, I'm unsure as to whether he doesn't do his job or whether he does it too well.

Leigh Whannell's acting isn't up to his writing, as his script is much more successful than his performance as Adam. He was the first actor cast, having played the lead of David in the 2003 short, also titled Saw, in the role that became Amanda in this feature. Much of the reason that the film stayed independent is that director James Wan wasn't willing to lose Whannell as Adam; while another actor might have been better in the role, that choice indirectly led to many of the successes of the film. With Wan unable to do much of what he wanted because of the restrictions of budget, cast and time, he found himself gradually forced to use his imagination to make everything work. Unusable shots became still photographs or footage from a surveillance camera. The end result ws something that's 'more gritty and rough around the edges', which helped it feel real. No wonder the underlying theme is one of control; Wan and Whannell were constantly fighting to keep control of their project and then the film that they wanted to make.

If Cary Elwes got the opportunity to depict a man who believes he has control over his life, even though it isn't deserved, and who rails the most against the Jigsaw Killer taking that control away from him, the rest of the cast didn't get those chances. Danny Glover shot all his scenes as Det Tapp in two days; while he's far from bad in the role, it deserved to be more substantial. I like that Tapp isn't the lead character, as he would have been in most takes on this story, but he deserved better than he got. Dina Meyer is hardly in the movie as another detective and neither is Tobin Bell, who would soon dominate the franchise. Michael Emerson is far too overt as Zep Hindle, one of Gordon's orderlies who gets hauled into the mix too. It's Shawnee Smith and Ken Leung who impress most in smaller roles as Amanda and Det Sing respectively. Each of these characters returned in future films, though sometimes only tangentially. Bell is in all seven pictures; Smith, Meyer and Emerson four each, Glover and Leung three and Elwes in two.

One sure reason why the film did so well is its ending, which is one of the great twists of the modern era. It's been torn apart by many critics and with possible good reason, but I believe that it's easy to explain it without venturing into the dubious logic of conspiracy theorists. Then again, if I'm right, it would counter the general tone of control that pervades the picture. There are other things I'd complain about first. One is how it's impossible to figure everything out ourselves from what we're given early on; we're reliant on a steady stream of information throughout to fill in gaps. Another is the complexity of the film's structure which unfolds in an overly complex set of flashbacks, mostly to keep the stream of information flowing. It leads to the next, which is that the script is effectively playing with us just as much as the Jigsaw Killer is playing with his victims. Most annoying to me was how Wan and Whannell task us with figuring out their puzzle but deem us incapable of reading the periodic notes. In fact, that's not just annoying, it's insulting.

I stand by my rating of Saw as a capable and original thriller, especially considering its budget, even if its varied issues become more and more apparent with repeat viewings. I'm hardly going to complain much about a movie that spurs us to think earning close to a hundred times what it cost to produce. It certainly deserves to be judged on its own merits and not merely as part of a franchise which soon came to value the cruel ingenuity of its traps over clear stories and its characters, which are less believable as the films ran on. It also can't be judged on its legacy, which directly led to more overt examples of the torture porn genre. I firmly believe that it's been mostly forgotten in favour of its even more successful sequels and I wonder how it'll be received when it's re-released in theatres this Hallowe'en for its tenth anniversary. It may bring some respect back to the franchise, which is far more successful commercially than critically, but it may disappoint people used to the more extreme material in the sequels.

Director: John Carpenter
Stars: Roddy Piper, Keith David, Meg Foster, George 'Buck' Flower, Peter Jason and Raymond St Jacques

This film was an official selection at the 9th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 films.

Back in the eighties, when I found the money to go out and discover a wider variety of movies than were broadcast on the four TV channels we had in England at the time, John Carpenter was surely the biggest name in genre cinema. He seemed to be most highly regarded for two hits, Halloween and Escape from New York, both of which did very well at the box office and strongly resonated down the years. Yet today, it's his less heralded features that stand up best, especially Big Trouble in Little China, which lost money at the box office, and They Live, which made a profit but hardly a spectacular one. If I had to pick a third place, it would be Assault on Precinct 13, Carpenter's update to Rio Bravo, as Halloween feels simplistic now and Escape from New York wears some of its more convenient scenes on its sleeve. By comparison, They Live feels more and more relevant with each year that passes. It's horrifying to realise that it often feels like we're living in this world that Carpenter created in 1988. How do we shut down the source?

At the time, They Live was quintessentially about the eighties, perhaps why many critics didn't see much value in its message; they needed to skip forward a few decades to see how it would all evolve. In truth, Carpenter was railing against a number of things, one reason why They Live doesn't feel like a one note message, but at its heart, it's anti-consumerism. He told Starlog that he'd started to watch TV again and that he realised that everything was designed to sell us something, but he also noticed the reflection of this in the thriving yuppie movement, which tied success specifically to money, and the Reaganomics of the time. Carpenter naturally polarised this in his script to become a 'them and us' scenario, but as he phrased 'them' as alien free enterprisers and 'us' as the human race, he tapped into a set of wider truths about modern America that have become more obvious with each year that passes, a recognition that the class system of the British is present in the United States too, merely manifested in a different form.

Today, yuppies and Reaganomics have gone by the wayside, but They Live feels more contemporary than ever because it's phrased vaguely enough to be universally applicable. When I rewatched it in 2012 and again in 2013 at the International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival, it felt like Carpenter was writing specifically about the Occupy movement, the 99% and venture capital firms like Bain Capital. Watching again for this review, it's suddenly reminiscent of Ferguson, MO, police brutality and the erosion of the middle class. I'm sure Carpenter looked backwards for references to McCarthy's communist witchhunts and the civil rights movement, but he also presaged climate change, subliminal advertising and modern corporate America. He certainly adapted one of the most telling lines in the film, 'We all sell out every day' from an executive at Universal. Since then, Universal has not incidentally sold out to a whole string of global multinationals and is currently owned by Comcast.

I first saw They Live on British TV as a presentation of Moviedrome, in which Alex Cox introduced me to a stunning range of films and, in many ways, placed me on the road to Apocalypse Later. I remember that Cox highlighted that the primary character is homeless, hardly a common scenario for a lead in an action movie. He's also never named, his credited name of Nada meaning 'nothing' in Spanish', and the product of a broken home, from which he ran away at the age of thirteen. The movie's title is sourced from graffiti within it, initially underneath a bridge, and it opens with Nada walking past it, literally travelling from the other side of the tracks in search of work; he ends up in a shanty town for the homeless quite a distance away. However, he's not phrased as a victim. While the government's job centres have nothing for him, he's an able bodied man with his own tools and he finds work on a construction site himself. 'I believe in America,' he tells a bitter co-worker. 'Everybody's got their own hard times these days.'

His optimism isn't reflected in anything else we see or hear, as hammered home in the early scenes. The lady he meets at the job centre doesn't care and doesn't want to listen; the loudspeakers explain that the food stamp programme has been suspended; a man in a wheelchair rolls past him, shaking his head. Out in the streets, a preacher asks, 'Why do we worship greed?' before a cop shows up to shut off his words. Frank, that bitter co-worker, hasn't seen his wife and kids in six months; they're back home in Detroit, but he had to leave because the steel mills closed down. Nada came from Denver where 'things just seemed to dry up.' In other words, it's not just here, it's everywhere. The only way out is through television, where you can watch and dream, even if it's in a shop window. It doesn't address the problems of society, but it serves as a temporary escape from them. On television, you'll never, never grow old and you'll never die. No wonder people stop trying, even in the shanty town; it's much easier to escape than to try.

But breaking into that signal comes an old bearded hacker, ironically because he's using 'their' medium, to rail at the complacence of the people. He isn't received well, partially because his message is nowhere near commercial (how about zingers like, 'We are living in an artificially induced state of consciousness that resembles sleep' or 'their intention to rule rests with the annihilation of consciousness') and partially because the interference literally gives them headaches. The truth hurts, right? His more effective words are very familiar, but here's where the setup ends and our story really begins. Clearly something is going on at the African Methodist Episcopal Free Church over the road from the homeless town and our hero is an inquisitive soul. He wanders in to find that it's a front for a group of scientists who discovered the truth behind all the proselytising and want to wake up the populace. Talking at them doesn't help, but what has a chance are the sunglasses they're manufacturing that show things as they really are.

Given that They Live is now over a quarter of a century old, that the point at which Nada puts on a pair of these sunglasses is only half an hour into the movie and that what he sees has passed into pop culture to the degree that street artist Shepard Fairey's Obey campaign was deliberately inspired by it and arguably his iconic Obama Hope poster was too, it seems fair to talk about it. When wearing these sunglasses, the world of colour that we know is transformed into black and white, partly because it works metaphorically and partly because Ted Turner was prominently colorising classic movies at the time and it seemed like a good way to make him out to be 'a monster from outer space'. Images and words vanish too, replaced by simple subliminal slogans on every advertising hoarding, every page of every magazine, every sign in a window. Many contain only a single word: 'Obey', 'Consume' or 'Conform', while others are more complex, such as 'Do Not Question Authority' or 'No Independent Thought'. Paper money reads 'This is Your God'.

What's more, while some people look identical, others are utterly different, like a mass of bruises without skin. That's because they're the aliens who own us and the message becomes crystal clear. The first alien we see is an affluent white businessman but the first human is a black newspaper seller; in this world, we call them 'sir'. Masters are alien, but their servants are human. Aliens get promoted, while humans don't. Some cops are human but most aren't, something that echoes today in the maxim that good cops protect bad cops. Stumbling around town in a daze as he can see the truth, Nada decides that he'll do something about it and the rest of the story falls easily into place, the social comment stronger early on but not lost as the film turns into an action piece. The most telling moments arrive late, such as the transformation of Buck Flower's character, a lazy nobody from the shanty town now gussied up in a suit and bow tie as the epitome of the nouveau riche. 'We all sell out every day,' he says. 'Might as well be on the winning team.'

For a movie that carries a whopper of a message, much better constructed than the hacker's diatribe that is primarily received as 'just that idiot licking his nuts again,' it's a highly enjoyable piece. The source was a story called Eight O'Clock in the Morning by Ray Nelson, published in Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1963 and it's surprisingly close to Carpenter's adaptation to the big screen. George Nada wakes up to a similar revelation after being hypnotised on stage, finding that our world is ruled by Fascinators who breed us for food but control us through subliminals. It ends with an extra twist that isn't in the film, surprisingly given that it's even shorter than this review, under two thousand words, but Carpenter does a magnificent job of turning them into 94 minutes of visualisation and social analogy, not least through how he phrased the characters. Nada is far from the only unusual primary character and, even a quarter of a century on, this stands surprisingly alone in its varied heroes, right down to the heavily tattooed biker with a long beard.

Playing the homeless, nameless hero is Roddy Piper, who is a better actor today than he was in 1988 but is perfectly cast nonetheless as the everyman; as Carpenter told Starlog: 'Unlike most Hollywood actors, Roddy has life written all over him.' At the time he was best known for his career as a WWF wrestler, but he was starting to dabble in movies, first being noticed in this and the much lower budget Hell Comes to Frogtown in 1988. Playing opposite the white guy is a black guy, Keith David, clearly a much better actor, who had impressed Carpenter during the making of The Thing. He wrote the part of Frank for him, as he 'wouldn't be a traditional sidekick, but could hold his own.' Just as prominent in a smaller role as a blind, black street preacher is Raymond St Jacques, who had broken down a boundary on his own, becoming in 1965 the first black actor to become a regular on a western series on television, as cattle drover Simon Blake on Rawhide. It's appropriate that he was a noted civil rights activist in real life. He sells his role.

Buck Flower is perfectly cast as the drifter who finds his way up the food chain by selling out. It's notable that unlike most of the homeless folk in the shanty town, he never seems to do anything except sit back and watch television. His creaky voice is perfect for the role, as are his unkempt looks. As Gilbert, whose part in running the shanty town is mostly a front for his more subversive operations in the underground, Peter Jason is strong too, even if he's one of those actors who we remember visually without ever letting his name sink into our skulls. He was also in Carpenter's previous picture, Prince of Darkness, another of his underrated gems. And that leaves Meg Foster, whose unique blue eyes have never been more overt. She has an odd role, in that she doesn't show up until almost halfway through the film and does so as a hostage. She plays Holly Thompson as cool, composed and conciliatory. 'You have two guns,' she tells Nada. 'You're not sorry. You're in charge.' Yet the moment she can act, she does, quickly and powerfully.

There's so much to discuss in They Live that a review can easily run away and become a book of its own, something impossible to even conceive with most eighties action movies, which are often looked back at as guilty pleasures, the nostalgia overriding the cheese. That cheese isn't entirely absent though, as we can't forget the film's most famous line and most famous scene, both of which are remembered far more than the substance and depth that pervades They Live. The line, of course, is Nada's oft quoted, 'I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass, and I'm all out of bubblegum.' Piper apparently ad libbed the line, but he certainly didn't ad lib the long alley fight he worked with Keith David, all to get him to put on sunglasses. Carpenter had them watch The Quiet Man, with John Wayne battling Victor McLaglen, then they built up the choreography over weeks. It's arguable that fight credibility is lost whenever a suplex is added into it, but if it's bringing new people to They Live after 26 years, it's well worth it.

Director: Travis Mills
Stars: Stacie Stocker, Maria Patti, Susan Rienzo, Dillard Taylor and Jesse Michael-Geronimo Valencia

By week twelve, Travis Mills was getting into his stride and feeling confident. 'Every week I feel us getting better at telling these stories,' he noted in the webseries episode shot alongside this. It's understandable, as he'd cleared some notable obstacles in previous weeks and found this one easy running. 'We got done in one day what I had scheduled for two,' he explained. Then again, this was a relatively simple film, with a tiny crew and a cast that wasn't much bigger; only three locations, none of which were outdoors; and a source story that tries to do a lot with very little, much like many Running Wild short films. It's the next in James Joyce's Dubliners and it has to do with a young lady who wants out of the life she has and into one that's different in every way: exotic, romantic and alive. Her ticket to this new life, literally, is a sailor who has 'fallen on his feet in Buenos Ayres'. He wants her to be his wife and he has a house ready for her to move into. Of course, this is a Joyce story, so pessimism ensues.

It's easy to see Eveline as yet another of Joyce's short stories that has a huge build but no payoff and it's easy to leave it empty and unfulfilled. However, there's a real truth here that I've witnessed myself often and I've personally gone through what Eveline finds that she can't. Everything in the story exists to lead up to her decision and it's the sum of it that makes the difference rather than any one piece. Eveline has a miserable life, one she dearly wants to leave behind, but that miserable life is all she knows. In the end, it'll always be better the devil you know even if the grass isn't as green, or some other mangled pair of proverbs. There are a lot of them that speak to this situation, because it's such a common one. I grew up in England, where I thankfully wasn't miserable like Eveline, but I left my family, country and life to move to another continent and get married. Ten years on, I haven't once regretted my decision, however much I miss the food, but I know many others who dream of doing the same thing but absolutely never will.

Mills's adaptation to the screen is an anorexic one indeed. I was surprised to find that it ran six minutes, as it feels like half that. Much of Joyce's story is built of memories and to adapt it faithfully would require a much more substantial shoot than was viable. I like what Mills brought in to replace them, a miserable pair of women from Eveline's work moaning about how she's leaving and talking down her chances. I'm familiar with bleating women like this (of both sexes) because I've had to listen to conversations just like this one while I was fixing their computers and they couldn't work in the meantime. They're the sort who are happy being unhappy and the best way to do that is to be jealous about someone else who might do what they know they never will. Maria Patti and Susan Rienzo are frustrating to watch because I've seen this so often, but they do it well. Unfortunately, the flipside of ditching all those memories is that Stacie Stocker has to find a way for Eveline to explain everything she's leaving with facial expressions.

And that's frankly impossible, so she's up against it from moment one. She's a really odd choice for this role and I wonder why Michael Hanelin cast her as Eveline. For a start, she's a long way from nineteen, however good she looks, so the whole dynamic of a young woman wondering if she can really leave the only home she's known is completely lost. This Eveline has a whole lot more experience behind her than Joyce's Eveline, so her decision is completely different. Perhaps that's why Mills ended his story a little sooner than Joyce ended his. Stocker's also a very strong woman, which makes this part a tough one for her to sell. The scene where she summons up the strength to leave her father behind in their RV without making his breakfast first is exactly what she does best, but most of her part calls for weakness instead, whether it's through fear of her father or fear of the unknown. With a lot more screen time, I'm sure she could nail the part, but she doesn't have that luxury and it really shows.

While Dillard Taylor is a much more natural casting choice and he does very well with his few moments on screen, Jesse Michael-Geronimo Valencia has an even tougher task than Stocker. While Joyce had his Eveline fall for a sailor who's back in his home country for a holiday and wants her to sail away with him, Mills's contemporary version has an internet romance that leads to her driving out to Sky Harbor. It's the right update, but we only hear the object of Eveline's affections through a computer screen as we watch her face and that's a really tough set up to generate shared charisma. In the end, Valencia merely has to settle for matching Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio's record in my mind as the actor with the most syllables in their name. I'm unsure as to what Mills could have done with this story, as a faithful adaptation would have been ten minutes of narrated montage leading up to a brief and unsatisfying ending. He tries for a better film than that but only manages to give us the bones, not the flesh.

Heavy Metal Horror (2014)

The Rounders (1914)

Running on Empty Dreams (2009)

The Bum (2014)

Found (2012)

Sader Ridge (2013)

Found in Time (2012)

The Four (2012)

Errors of the Human Body (2012)

Because There are Things You Never Forget (2008)

Muñecas (2009)

You Touched Me (2014)

Necromentia (2009)

Play Dead (2012)

Kiss of the Damned (2012)

The New Janitor (1914)

Gamera vs Guiron (1969)

Saw (2004)

They Live (1988)

Eveline (2014)